Extremely Linear High Contrast Digital Visible Light Camera

Amain has developed and proposes a new electronic camera technology that digitally captures and converts at the pixel level. The approach, MOSAD,Multiplexed OverSample Analog to digital conversion is based on well proven oversample analog to digital conversion, A/D, processes. Oversample A/D at the pixel is accomplished using charge transfers, eliminating the need for precision or trimmed components to achieve high accuracy. Readout noise is filtered out to such an extent that transistor buffering at the pixel is not required as with active pixel sensors, APS. A randomly accessed monolithic silicon visible light digital sensor array can be built with pixel sizes smaller than 16 microns using low cost 1.2 micron charge well technology. A fill factor of better than 60% is also achieved without microlenses. MOSAD provides a sensing and conversion process that is inherently linear, well beyond the 0.01% that has been reported with other approaches. One of the benefits of this new approach is that the entire process of detection and conversion is contained in a simple monolithic chip. The effort involved will be to design and develop the sensor.