Implementation of TDI based digital pixel ROIC with 15μm pixel pitch

A 15um pixel pitch digital pixel for LWIR time delay integration (TDI) applications is implemented which occupies one fourth of pixel area compared to previous digital TDI implementation. TDI is implemented on 8 pixels with oversampling rate of 2. ROIC provides 16 bits output with 8 bits of MSB and 8 bits of LSB. Pixel can store 75 M electrons with a quantization noise of 500 electrons. Digital pixel TDI implementation is advantageous over analog counterparts considering power consumption, chip area and signal-to-noise ratio. Digital pixel TDI ROIC is fabricated with 0.18um CMOS process. In digital pixel TDI implementation photocurrent is integrated on a capacitor in pixel and converted to digital data in pixel. This digital data triggers the summation counters which implements TDI addition. After all pixels in a row contribute, the summed data is divided to the number of TDI pixels(N) to have the actual output which is square root of N improved version of a single pixel output in terms of signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR).