A low driving voltage CCD with single layer electrode structure for area image sensor

A single layer electrode two-phase CCD is studied for the purpose of obtaining low power consumption interline-transfer CCD(IT-CCD) image sensor. The CCD has both a storage region under a thick gate oxide and a barrier region under a thin gate oxide for each transfer electrode. In order to attain high charge transfer efficiency for an extremely low driving voltage below 2 V, a new alignment-deviation-free structure and a potential pocket suppression structure are introduced. A 1/3 inch format 270 K pixel IT-CCD image sensor with the horizontal CCD driving voltage of 1.8 V is developed by employing the single layer electrode structure for the first time. The four-phase vertical CCDs also have the single layer electrode structure. The single layer electrode structure is very useful for vertical scale-down which is indispensable for the chip size shrinking.<>