A CMOS slew-rate enhanced OTA for imaging

CMOS Image Sensors have many applications currently. They are present everywhere and almost everyone owns many cameras based on these sensors ranging from mobile phones (with several cameras), to tablets, computers, security devices and cars. Although they work pretty well as we increase their resolution and quality we face a few problems. One of these problems is Flicker noise. The other source of noise, thermal, evolved a lot recently and flicker noise is now the main limitation regarding improving the performance. This work presents a new method to reduce the flicker noise contribution in the overall sensor noise by reducing the time for Double Sampling, allowing to filters more correctly the flicker noise spectrum introduced by the pixel source follower amplifier. We also introduce a way to remove the column induced lag that comes from the column readout circuitry by using strong and stable references. We propose a new amplifier that is used as a buffer for the reference voltage. At the same time Double Sampling is performed. This solution contributes both to reduce the current consumption and time between samples which also contributes to a lower power heat dissipation. The developed circuit can be seen as a generic solution for applications that need stable references and high resolution, resulting in a massively parallel circuit, as it is common in CMOS image sensors. The proposed solution is tested with a circuit containing 3000 readout columns. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.