High-Speed Global Shutter CMOS Machine Vision Sensor with High Dynamic Range Image Acquisition and Embedded Intelligence

High-speed imagers are required for industrial applications, traffic monitoring, robotics and unmanned vehicles, movie-making, etc. Many of these applications call also for large spatial resolution, high sensitivity and the ability to detect images with large intra-frame dynamic range. This paper reports a CIS intelligent digital image sensor with 5.2Mpixels which delivers 12-bit fully-corrected images at 250Fps. The new sensor embeds on-chip digital processing circuitry for a large variety of functions including: windowing; pixel binning; sub-sampling; combined windowing-binning-sub-sampling modes; fixed-pattern noise correction; fine gain and offset control; color processing, etc. These and other CIS functions are programmable through a simple four-wire serial port interface.