A 200-mW, 3.3-V, CMOS color camera IC producing 352×288 24-b video at 30 frames/s

A digital color camera has been monolithically realized in a standard 0.8-μm CMOS technology. The chip integrates a 353×292 photogate sensor array with a unity-gain column circuit, a hierarchical column multiplexer, a switched-capacitor programmable-gain amplifier, and an 8-b flash analog/digital converter together with digital circuits performing color interpolation, color correction, computation of image statistics, and control functions. The 105-mm² chip produces 24-b RGB video at 30 frames/s. The sensor array achieves a conversion gain of 40 μV/electron and a monochrome sensitivity of 7 V/lux·s. For a 33-ms exposure time, the camera chip achieves a dynamic range of 65 dB and peak-to-peak fixed pattern noise that is 0.3% of saturation. Digital switching noise coupling into the analog circuits is shown to be data independent and therefore has no effect on image quality. Total power dissipation is less than 200 mW from a 3.3 V supply