A Photon-Counting 4Mpixel Stacked BSI Quanta Image Sensor with 0.3e- Read Noise and 100dB Single-Exposure Dynamic Range

This paper reports a 4Mpixel, 3D-stacked backside illuminated Quanta Image Sensor (QIS) with 2.2um pixels that can operate simultaneously in photon-counting mode with deep sub-electron read noise (0.3e- rms) and linear integration mode with large full-well capacity (30k e-). A single-exposure dynamic range of 100dB is realized with this dual-mode readout under room temperature. This QIS device uses a cluster-parallel readout architecture to achieve up to 120fps frame rate at 550mW power consumption.