Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Cypress Designed BSI Sensor for NEC Toshiba Space Systems

Cypress designed a custom BSI CMOS image sensor for a satellite hyperspectral imaging application from NEC TOSHIBA Space Systems, Ltd. In addition to the BSI, the imager integrates Cypress’s patented global-shutter technology, which enables fast frame rates with the ability to read one frame while the next is being captured. The sensor is arranged in a 1024 column x 256 row configuration. The design includes on-board ADCs and a high-speed digital interface tailored for space applications.

The imager is planned to be in space-qualified flight models by mid-2010. The sensor is expected to be available for other space and military applications after flight qualification is completed.

4 comments:

  1. they say "BSI allowed Cypress to use noise reduction techniques such as correlated double sampling without compromising spectral response or sensitivity"

    ---I don't understand how BSI has anything to do with implementation of CDS... can someone explain this to me or is it just something that got created in press-release-land?

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  2. The sensor has electronic global shutter, so they need to put more transistors in the pixel. The increased fill factor of BSI allows them to put more transistors in the pixel, without compromising the photodiode area, thus they can keep CDS (add another transistor).

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  3. sounds like a more accurate statement would be to say that the BSI improves the QE to the point where they can implement CDS in pixel without badly compromising the parametric performance.

    But BSI really is orthogonal to implementing CDS, it just may make for a better performing sensor when CDS is used.

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  4. They say they DESIGNED a sensor compatible with BSI, not PROCESSED a BSI chip. Being capable to process BSI is probably more work than actually design the chip, and I am not even talking about qualification for space...

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