Circuit Techniques to Improve Low-Light Characteristics and High-Accuracy Evaluation System for CMOS Image Sensor

The surveillance cameras we focus on target the volume zone, and area reduction is a top priority. However, by simplifying the ADC comparator, we face a new RUSH current issue, for which we propose a circuit solution. This paper proposes two novel techniques of column-ADC for surveillance cameras to improve low-light characteristics. RUSH current compensation reduces transient current consumption fluctuations during AD conversion and utilizing timing shift ADCs decreases the number of simultaneously operating ADCs. These proposed techniques improve low-light characteristics because they reduce the operating noise of the circuit. In order to support small signal measurement, this paper also proposes a high-accuracy evaluation system that can measure both small optical/electrical signals in low-light circumstances. To demonstrate these proposals, test chips were fabricated using a 55 nm CIS process and their optical/electrical characteristics were measured. As a result, low-light linearity as optical characteristics were reduced by 63% and column interference (RUSH current) as an electrical characteristic was also reduced by 50%. As for the high-accuracy evaluation system, we confirmed that the inter-sample variation of column interference was 0.05 LSB. This ADC achieved a figure-of-merit (FoM) of 0.32 e-·pJ/step, demonstrating its usefulness for other ADC architectures while using a single-slope-based simple configuration.