CMOS Fundamentals

doi:10.1117/3.2524677.ch4

CMOS Fundamentals

Book: CMOS/CCD Sensors and Camera Systems, Second Edition

Author(s): Gerald C. Holst, Terrence S. Lomheim

Published: 2011

https://doi.org/10.1117/3.2524677.ch4

Author Affiliations +

Abstract

In the 1990s, the monolithic complementary metal-oxide silicon (CMOS) imaging sensor (CIS) emerged as a serious alternative to charge-coupled device (CCD) arrays. This was a natural outcome of improvements in silicon CMOS manufacturing technology, which had been technically and economically driven by digital applications (e.g., microprocessors, memory devices, floating point gate arrays). The advantage is that one or more active transistors can be integrated into the pixel. These are also called active pixel sensors or APS detectors. This text uses ‘CIS’ to differentiate between the imaging sensor and CMOS digital circuitry. Common parlance simply uses ‘CMOS’ where it is understood that it is an imaging sensor.