CMOS Depth Image Sensor with Offset Pixel Aperture Using a Back-Side Illumination Structure for Improving Disparity

This paper presents a CMOS depth image sensor with offset pixel aperture (OPA) using a back-side illumination structure to improve disparity. The OPA method is an efficient way to obtain depth information with a single image sensor without additional external factors. Two types of apertures (i.e., left-OPA (LOPA) and right-OPA (ROPA)) are applied to pixels. The depth information is obtained from the disparity caused by the phase difference between the LOPA and ROPA images. In a CMOS depth image sensor with OPA, disparity is important information. Improving disparity is an easy way of improving the performance of the CMOS depth image sensor with OPA. Disparity is affected by pixel height. Therefore, this paper compared two CMOS depth image sensors with OPA using front-side illumination (FSI) and back-side illumination (BSI) structures. As FSI and BSI chips are fabricated via different processes, two similar chips were used for measurement by calculating the ratio of the OPA offset to pixel size. Both chips were evaluated for chief ray angle (CRA) and disparity in the same measurement environment. Experimental results were then compared and analyzed for the two CMOS depth image sensors with OPA.