Smart Cmos Image Sensors

Because of their high noise immunity and low static power supply drain, complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices produce less heat than other forms of logic and allow a high density of logic functions on a chip.

Noise is a serious problem in digital imaging. In digital photography, the consumer- and prosumer-level cameras produce images with an easily noticeable noise component, which is especially strong in images taken at high ISO rates. Scanned photos contain a similar film grain component. The noise and grain reduce the visual quality of digital images and resulting printouts.

The idea of writing a book on CMOS imaging has been brewing for several years. It was placed on a fast track after we agreed to organize a tutorial on CMOS sensors for the 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2004). This tutorial defined the structure of the book, but as first time authors/editors, we had a lot to learn about the logistics of putting together information from multiple sources. Needless to say, it was a long road between the tutorial and the book, and it took more than a few months to complete. We hope that you will find our journey worthwhile and the collated information useful. The laboratories of the authors are located at many universities distributed around the world. Their unifying theme, however, is the advancement of knowledge for the development of systems for CMOS imaging and image processing. We hope that this book will highlight the ideas that have been pioneered by the authors, while providing a roadmap for new practitioners in this field to exploit exciting opportunities to integrate imaging and “smartness” on a single VLSI chip. The potential of these smart imaging systems is still unfulfilled. Hence, there is still plenty of research and development to be done.