• Journal of Radiation Industry
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.31-40
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• 2012

There are two methods to fabricate the readout electronic to a large-area CMOS image sensor (LACIS). One is to design and manufacture the sensor part and signal processing electronics in a single chip and the other is to integrate both parts with bump bonding or wire bonding after manufacturing both parts separately. The latter method has an advantage of the high yield because the optimized and specialized fabrication process can be chosen in designing and manufacturing each part. In this paper, LACIS chip, that is optimized design for the latter method of fabrication, is presented. The LACIS chip consists of a 3-TR pixel photodiode array, row driver (or called as a gate driver) circuit, and bonding pads to the external readout ICs. Among 4 types of the photodiode structure available in a standard CMOS process, $N_{photo}/P_{epi}$ type photodiode showed the highest quantum efficiency in the simulation study, though it requires one additional mask to control the doping concentration of $N_{photo}$ layer. The optimized channel widths and lengths of 3 pixel transistors are also determined by simulation. The select transistor is not significantly affected by channel length and width. But source follower transistor is strongly influenced by length and width. In row driver, to reduce signal time delay by high capacitance at output node, three stage inverter drivers are used. And channel width of the inverter driver increases gradually in each step. The sensor has very long metal wire that is about 170 mm. The repeater consisted of inverters is applied proper amount of pixel rows. It can help to reduce the long metal-line delay.