A low-power and small-area column-level ADC for high frame-rate CMOS pixel sensor

CMOS pixel sensors (CPS) have demonstrated performances meeting the specifications of the International Linear Collider (ILC) vertex detector (VTX). This paper presents a low-power and small-area 4-bit column-level analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for CMOS pixel sensors. The ADC employs a self-timed trigger and completes the conversion by performing a multi-bit/step approximation. As in the outer layers of the ILC vertex detector hit density is of the order of a few per thousand, in order to reduce power consumption, the ADC is designed to work in two modes: active mode and idle mode. The ADC is fabricated in a 0.35 μm CMOS process with a pixel pitch of 35 μm. It is implemented with 48 columns in a sensor prototype. Each column ADC covers an area of 35 ×545 μm2. The measured temporal noise and Fixed Pattern Noise (FPN) are 0.96 mV and 0.40 mV, respectively. The power consumption, for a 3 V supply and 6.25 MS/s sampling rate, is 486 μW during idle time, which is by far the most frequently employed one. This value rises to 714 μW in the case of the active mode. The measured differential nonlinearity (DNL) and integral nonlinearity (INL) are 0.49/−0.28 LSB and 0.29/−0.20 LSB, respectively.