CMOS image sensors - Past present and future

In this paper we present an historical perspective of CMOS image sensors from their inception in the mid 1960s through their resurgence in the 1980s and 90s to their dominance in the 21st century. We focus on the evolution of key performance parameters such as temporal read noise, fixed pattern noise, dark current, quantum efficiency, dynamic range, and sensor format, Le the number of pixels. We discuss how these properties were improved during the past 30 plus years. We also offer our perspective on how performance will be improved by CMOS technology scaling and the cell phone camera market.