A Single Slope ADC With Row-Wise Noise Reduction Technique for CMOS Image Sensor.

This paper presents a novel technique for single slope analog to digital converter (SSADC) to suppress the row-wise noise in CMOS image sensor. A sample switch is used in the current-steering DAC to reduce the noise introduced by bias circuits, which will deteriorate the characteristic of uniformity in the row direction. The sample switch can fix the voltage which biases the current source in the current-steering DAC when generating a ramp to avoid the ramp fluctuation in the time domain. The digital correlated double sampling is used to reduce the non-uniformity in column-level ADCs. The CMOS image sensor prototype is fabricated in 110nm 1P3M process. The 10-bit SSADC achieves DNL of −0.20 / +0.15 LSB and INL of −1.35 / +0.91 LSB at a sampling frequency of 29.2 KHz. It is proved that the row-wise noise is reduced from $764~\mu {\mathrm {V}}_{\text {rms}}$ to 163 $\mu {\mathrm {V}}_{\text {rms}}$ at a frame rate of 228 fps using the proposed sample switch structure. The prototype photos taken by the sensor show that the row-wise noise is reduced under the low-illumination circumstance effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]