Advances in 3D CMOS image sensors optical modeling: combining realistic morphologies with FDTD

This paper describes an innovative methodology to investigate the relationship between device morphology and the optical performance of CMOS image sensors. By coupling a FDTD-based 3D Maxwell solver with silicon-accurate process modeling software, we have been able to analyze the sensitivity of image sensor quantum efficiency with respect to statistical variations in nm-scale device topology. Additionally, we studied pyramidal silicon structuration for quantum efficiency enhancement as proposed in [1].