Paper

A 4.0μm Stacked Digital Pixel Sensor Operating in A Dual Quantization Mode for High Dynamic Range

2021 September

Authors Kazuya Mori, Naoto Yasuda, Toshiyuki Isozaki, Ken Miyauchi, Isao Takayanagi, Junichi Nakamura, H. C. Chien, Ken Fu, SG. Wuu, Andrew Berkovich*, Song Chen*, Wei Gao* and Chiao Liu*
*Facebook Inc.

2021 International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW)
https://imagesensors.org/Past%20Workshops/2021%20Workshop/2021%20Papers/R47.pdf

This article presents a prototype 4.0μm stacked DPS operating in its dual quantization (2Q) to realize HDR. The 4.0μm DPS pixel is formed with two layers, a backside illuminated pinned photodiode (PD) pixel on the top layer and an in-pixel analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) circuit with 9-bit static random access memory (SRAM) on the bottom layer. A Cu-to-Cu hybrid bonding (HB) technology is used to connect the two layers via pixel-level interconnect. In the 2Q scheme, a time-stamp (TS) quantization and a linear ADC are performed sequentially in the same frame, which extends the dynamic range (DR) with a small number of ADC bits of 9. The DPS with a 1024 × 832 pixel array has achieved a single-exposure ultra HDR of 107 dB in a single frame.