Cmosis, a developer and supplier of high-end CMOS image sensors, has added a new member to its CMV CMOS image sensor family: the 12 Megapixel CMV12000. The off-the-shelf image sensor is manufactured in TowerJazz's Fab-2 in Migdal Haemek, using its advanced 0.18µm specialty CIS process. TowerJazz is a specialist foundry company.
The sensor features 5.5 x 5.5µm pixels laid out in a high-resolution 4,096 x 3,072 matrix resembling the APS-C format. CMV12000 offers high sensitivity and low noise, global shutter and a frame rate of 300fps, which provides best in-class performance.
The CMOS sensor is perfectly suited for a broad range of industrial, movie and TV, traffic monitoring, and motion control applications.
Cmosis continues to rely on TowerJazz for its products due to its very advanced and proven CMOS image sensor technology that meets the growing demand for optical sensors used in consumer, industrial, medical and automotive applications. TowerJazz's extensive experience in the imaging field, combined with its own CIS technology developed in-house, enables best-in-class customised designs. TowerJazz's process offers superior performance (dark current, low noise and dynamic range), and its skilled experts support the customisation of pixels per customer requirements and project needs, enabling a rich solution for various digital imaging applications.
CMV12000 offers a dynamic range of 60dB, extendable to 90dB through several HDR (high dynamic range) operation modes. The sensor pixels have a very low parasitic light sensitivity (1:50,000) enabling high efficiency global shutter operation, which allows the sensor to capture extremely fast moving scenes without image distortion. One of the unique features of CMV12000 is the novel pixel structure, which combines pipelined global shutter operation with correlated double sampling (CDS). This technique, pioneered by Cmosis, yields an unprecedented low noise level below 13e- and a full well charge of 13,500 electrons. The global shutter CDS also significantly reduces the sensor matrix's fixed pattern noise (FPN) for better image quality.
CMV12000's on-chip A/D converter can be operated at 8-bit, 10-bit or 12-bit resolution. In the faster 10-bit mode, 300 full frames per second are acquired. At 12-bit, CMV12000 still achieves a frame rate of 180fps. The sensor's advanced architecture allows for row windowing and row sub-sampling. Up to 32 separate partial windows can be defined for an accelerated readout. Averaging several pixels raises these frame rates and increases the dynamic range.
