A White-RGB CFA-Patterned CMOS Image Sensor with Wide Dynamic Range

Author

Egawa, Yoshitaka ; Tanaka, Nagataka ; Kawai, Nobuhiro ; Seki, Hiromichi ; Nakao, Akira ; Honda, Hiroto ; Iida, Yoshinori ; Monoi, Makoto

Author_Institution

Toshiba, Kawasaki

fYear

2008

fDate

3-7 Feb. 2008

Firstpage

52

Lastpage

595

Abstract

CMOS image sensors is important for mobile phone cameras. But, when very small pixel sizes are used, the sensor SNR is limited by photon shot noise. In order to improve the sensor SNR Honda and Luo proposed the use of a sensor with a white (W) pixel in the color filter area. The white pixel, however, saturates at low light levels and sufficient dynamic range cannot be obtained as a result. In order to overcome the dynamic range problem, we propose a CIS with a WRGB color filter array (two white pixels per 2x2 block) incorporating the wide dynamic-range (WDR) technology.

Keywords

CMOS image sensors; mobile handsets; optical filters; CMOS image sensors; WRGB color filter array; color filter area; mobile phone cameras; white-RGB CFA-patterned image sensor; wide dynamic-range technology; CMOS image sensors; CMOS technology; Cameras; Color; Colored noise; Computational Intelligence Society; Dynamic range; Filters; Image sensors; Sensor arrays;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2008. ISSCC 2008. Digest of Technical Papers. IEEE International

Conference_Location

San Francisco, CA

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2010-0

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-2011-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISSCC.2008.4523052

Filename

4523052