The ISSCC forum, organized on Thursday, was focusing on Noise in Sensors (very general). A total of 9 presentations were given, of which (only) 3 focused on Imagers. The undersigned opened the forum with a general overview of Noise in Image Sensors, in the early afternoon Shoji Kawahito give a presentation on Low-Noise Image Sensors, and to conclude the forum, Neale Dutton had a talk about Noise in Single-Photon Detectors.
On one hand many people appreciated the general overview of noise present in many different type of sensors, on the other hand, not that many imaging engineers attended the forum because of the low number of talks about imagers. Nevertheless, the ISSCC organization seemed to be pretty happy with the number of registrations.
One very interesting detail from Neale’s presentation : he showed a very nice graph of published noise data which I include here in this blog (with permission of Neale !). On the vertical axis the input referred read noise in electrons is shown versus the conversion gain of the pixels.
The three lines shown in the graph are lines of equal read noise, “equinoise” lines, but this time noise expressed in uV. As can be seen, the lowest noise ever reported was 0.22 electrons, presented in JEDS2015, but the lowest noise ever reported in the voltage domain was 30 uV, presented at ISSCC2012. I do know that expressing noise in equivalent number of electrons is a very common technique which I support as well, but nevertheless, looking to the noise in the good, old classical way gives a complete other image. Now the challenge is to keep the 30 uV of noise level alive, while increasing the conversion gain !
Thanks Neale (not Neil) for this “fresh” view on the noise !
Albert, 08-02-2016.