CMOS Dual‐mode Energy‐harvesting‐image Sensor

Recently, with the benefit of low power, high speed, and feasibility of system‐on‐chip (SoC) integration, Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors (CIS) are replacing power‐hungry charge‐coupled devices (CCD) in many biomedical applications. This chapter introduces an energy harvesting type ultra‐low‐power CIS design with an integrated power management system (PMS) towards personal diagnosis application. It explains the design details of the new energy high‐energy harvesting image (EHI) pixel structure and pixel operations. The chapter describes the details of the readout circuitry block design, as well as other ultra‐low power functional imaging and energy harvesting blocks. It also introduces the overall architecture of the EHI imager with PMS. With the 96 × 96 sensor array under 1‐V power supply, the power consumption is only 6 μW with 5 fps speed, and simulated and measured performance characteristics of the EHI CIS are also presented.