Back to results
US 5,291,044 AGranted
Image sensor with continuous time photodiode
AssigneeEastman Kodak Company
InventorsMichael J. Gaboury, Teh-Hsuang Lee, Webster, Eric G. Stevens
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Loading patent…
Loading patent…
AssigneeEastman Kodak Company
InventorsMichael J. Gaboury, Teh-Hsuang Lee, Webster, Eric G. Stevens
Estimating the term…
In a solid state image sensor, such as a CCD image sensor having lateral antiblooming protection, the level of which is controlled by an overflow gate voltage forming a barrier, the storage of electrons in the photodiode junction region of the sensor is eliminated by removing the barrier and allowing the charge to flow from the sensor's photodiode junctions into the overflow region. The charge flow is then detected as a function of the instantaneous light impinging on the photodiodes. The physical connections of the overflow gates are selected to form zones. Since the charge flow now represent the instantaneous light intensity, higher frequency components are detected than that limited by the sensor sampling rate. An amplifier is connected to sense the charge flow from each zone. With the range of light intensity being large the amplifier is provided with a logarithmic feed back element. This element provides compression of a signal representing the sensed charge flow.
In a solid state image sensor having lateral antiblooming protection, the level of which is controlled by an applied voltage on an overflow gate forming a barrier to charge flow into an overflow channel, the improvement of providing a continuous time output signal indicative of the instantaneous light impinging on the photosites of the image sensor comprising:
A solid state image sensor comprising:
A CCD image sensor having charge storage regions coupled to photosensitive sites comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.