Characteristics of Fault-Tolerant Photodiode and Photogate Active Pixel Sensor (APS)

Reliability and manufacturing costs due to defects is a significant problem with image sensors and the ability to recover from a fault would alleviate some of these costs. A fault-tolerant APS has been designed by splitting the APS pixel into two halves operating in parallel, where the photo sensing element has been divided in two and the readout transistors have been duplicated while maintaining a common row select transistor. This split design allows for a self correcting pixel scheme such that if one half of the pixel is faulty, the other half can be used to recover the entire output signal. The fault tolerant APS design has been implemented in a 0.18

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: DFT
• Authors: Michelle L. La Haye, Glenn H. Chapman, Cory Jung, Desmond Y. H. Cheung, Sunjaya Djaja, Benjamin Wang, Gary Liaw, Yves Audet
• Keywords: DFT 2004, Fault Tolerant, Half Faulty Pixel, Pixel, VLSI