Oversampled centroid A to D converter

Details Oversampled centroid A to D converter Oversampled centroid A to D converter

2002-09-10

2004-01-13

Jeanglaude, Jean Bruner (Department: 2819)

Coded data generation or conversion

Analog to or from digital conversion

Increasing converter resolution

C341S156000, C358S500000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06677873

ABSTRACT:

BACKGROUND
An active pixel sensor typically takes the form shown in
FIG. 1. A
photosensor array
101
is disposed on a single chip substrate
100
with a number of columns
102
and rows
104
. Each pixel has a photoreceptor
122
, a follower transistor
124
, and a selection transistor
126
.
The pixels from the photosensor are coupled to one or more analog to digital converters
110
which convert the analog information
106
from the sensor
100
into digital output information
112
. The analog to digital converters
110
are typically on the same substrate
100
with the image sensor
100
. In a particularly preferred architecture, as shown, one analog to digital converter is associated with each column of the array. This system operates in column-parallel mode. At each clock cycle, an entire row of information is simultaneously output from the bank of analog to digital converters. The accuracy of the output image, which is collectively obtained from the output of all the analog to digital converters, is therefore dependent on the accuracy of the analog to digital converters. These devices, however, are limited in size. They must fit on the substrate. They also need to be relatively fast to maintain the processing speed.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention teaches a system of introducing statistical processing into the A/D converters in order to improve the overall image quality. This is done according to the present invention by using A/D converters that are configured to oversample the input signal, find a centroid of the oversampled signal, and use the oversampling to enhance the accuracy.
The ADCs can operate with fewer bits than required for the total output, since oversampling is carried out.


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patent: 6400824 (2002-06-01), Mansoorian et al.

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