Design and characteristics measurement of a high-speed CMOS imaging system

This paper introduces the design of a high-speed 2K times 2K CMOS imaging system that is part of a Wide Field Monitor System proposed in China recent years. The CMOS sensor used in this imaging system is LUPA-4000 from Cypress corp. This CMOS camera is composed of an analogue system and a digital embedded system. The digital embedded system integrated with an NIOS II soft-core processor serves as the control and data acquisition system of the camera. In addition, research on characteristics measurement for CMOS imagers was carried out, including readout noise, linearity, quantum efficiency, pixel non-uniformity, dark current, full-well capacity, and gain. The photon transfer technique is adopted to evaluate the gain and readout noise. At last, the evaluation results of the high-speed CMOS imaging system are shown. The results indicate that this high-speed CMOS camera can meet the requirements of the whole Wide Field Monitor System.