Hybrid Amorphous-Selenium/CMOS Low-Light Imager

Abstract

This thesis aims to demonstrate a low-light imager capable of moonlight-level imag- ing by combining a custom-designed complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) pixel array with amorphous selenium (a-Se) as its photosensor. Because of the low dark current of a-Se compared to standard silicon photodiodes, this hybrid structure could enable imagers fabricated in standard mixed-signal CMOS processes to achieve low- light imaging. Such hybrid imagers could have low-light performances comparable to other low-light imagers fabricated in specialized CMOS image-sensor processes. The 320 (H) x 240 (V) imager contains four different pixel designs arranged in four quadrants, with pixel pitches of 7.76 μm x 7.76 μm in quadrants 1 to 3 and 7.76 μm x 8.66 μm in quadrant 4 (Q4). The different quadrants are built to examine various performance-enhancing circuit designs and techniques, including series-stacked devices for leakage suppression, charge-injection suppression that uses dummy transistors, and a programmable dual-capacity design for extended pixel dynamic range. The imager- performance parameters, such as noise, dynamic range, conversion gain, linearity, and full-well capacity were simulated and experimentally verified. This work will also de- scribe the external hardware and software designs used to operate the imager. This thesis summarizes and reports the overall electrical and optical performance of pixels in quadrant 1. The observed signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of above 20 dB at an illuminance of 0.267 lux demonstrates that the imager can produce excellent images under moonlight-imaging conditions. This was achieved mainly through utilization of the long integration time enabled by circuit techniques implemented at the pixel level, as well as the low dark current of a-Se.