Design of an 8-tap CMOS lock-in pixel with lateral electric field charge modulator for highly time-resolved imaging

Recently, CMOS time-resolved imaging devices are being widely used for scientific and medical applications. A fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM), which is a powerful analysis tool in fundamental physics as well as in the life science, is a typical application for the time-resolved imaging devices. For better time-resolution in the lock-in pixel design, a multi-tap pixel architecture is very effective and useful. In this paper, we have proposed an 8-tap CMOS lock-in pixel with lateral electric field charge modulator (LEFM) and demonstrated the effectiveness of designed pixel by CAD simulation. The proposed pixel makes possible to measure the highly time-resolved images with a high signal to noise ratio (SNR) and to observe various images of cells even if a sample has a multi-lifetime component. An 8-tap time-resolved CMOS image sensor chip is developed by 0.11μm 1P4M CIS process technology.