A low-voltage CMOS complementary active pixel sensor (CAPS) fabricated using a 0.25 μm CMOS technology

A low voltage rail-to-rail CMOS complementary active pixel sensor (CAPS) architecture is presented. Compared with a conventional active pixel sensor (APS), the CAPS surpasses the bottleneck of limited output swing at ultra-low supply voltage operation imposed by highly scaled technology, making it more scalable compared with other reported architectures. The CAPS has been implemented with a commercially available 0.25 μm CMOS technology. The pixel size of the fabricated CAPS is 12 μm × 10 μm with a fill factor of 30%. It is verified that the CAPS is capable to operate at a V
_DD
below 1 V with a reasonable output swing.