High Dynamic Range Imaging at the Quantum Limit with Single Photon Avalanche Diode-Based Image Sensors

Neale A W Dutton; Tarek Al Abbas; Istvan Gyongy; Francescopaolo Mattioli Della Rocca; Robert K Henderson

doi:10.3390/s18041166

High Dynamic Range Imaging at the Quantum Limit with Single Photon Avalanche Diode-Based Image Sensors

Sensors (Basel). 2018 Apr 11;18(4):1166. doi: 10.3390/s18041166.

Authors

Neale A W Dutton¹, Tarek Al Abbas², Istvan Gyongy³, Francescopaolo Mattioli Della Rocca^{4

5}, Robert K Henderson⁶

Affiliations

¹ STMicroelectronics Imaging Division, Tanfield, Edinburgh EH3 5DA, UK. neale.dutton@st.com.
² School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, UK. tarek.alabbas@ed.ac.uk.
³ School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, UK. Istvan.Gyongy@ed.ac.uk.
⁴ STMicroelectronics Imaging Division, Tanfield, Edinburgh EH3 5DA, UK. Francesco.Mattiolidellarocca@ed.ac.uk.
⁵ School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, UK. Francesco.Mattiolidellarocca@ed.ac.uk.
⁶ School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, UK. robert.henderson@ed.ac.uk.

Abstract

This paper examines methods to best exploit the High Dynamic Range (HDR) of the single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) in a high fill-factor HDR photon counting pixel that is scalable to megapixel arrays. The proposed method combines multi-exposure HDR with temporal oversampling in-pixel. We present a silicon demonstration IC with 96 × 40 array of 8.25 µm pitch 66% fill-factor SPAD-based pixels achieving >100 dB dynamic range with 3 back-to-back exposures (short, mid, long). Each pixel sums 15 bit-planes or binary field images internally to constitute one frame providing 3.75× data compression, hence the 1k frames per second (FPS) output off-chip represents 45,000 individual field images per second on chip. Two future projections of this work are described: scaling SPAD-based image sensors to HDR 1 MPixel formats and shrinking the pixel pitch to 1-3 µm.

Keywords: CIS; CMOS image sensor; HDR; HDR SPC; QIS; SPC; high dynamic range; quanta image sensor; single photon avalanche diode (SPAD); single photon counting; spatio-temporal oversampling.