Design and Realization of a Low Consumption and Wide Output Swing Eight Transistors Active Pixel Sensor

For a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor image sensor with high accuracy, low noise and low power consumption, the extension of output swing and low power design techniques are becoming very significant. The paper analyzes the principles of pixel output swing limitation and then proposes a novel Eight Transistors Active Pixel Sensor with wide output swing and low power consumption characteristics. Using the slow-decay technique to suppress the impact of clock feedthrough on the output swing. The prototype pixel has been fabricated in a 0.18µm Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) standard process, the pixel parameters were validated using a 400,000-pixels array global shutter CMOS image sensor. Results show that the proposed Eight Transistors Active Pixel Sensor (8T-APS) is optimized that the output swing reaches 776mV and the power consumption is only 100nA with 3.3V supply. This method is particularly suitable for large-array global shutter image sensors.