Sony Corporation

Tadayoshi Mifune

Takeshi Matsushita

Teruaki Aoki

Shunsuke Furukawa

Hisao Hayashi

Seisuke Yamanaka

Motoaki Abe

Yasuo Kano

Yasuo Kanou

In a semiconductor image sensor composed of a plurality of charge-coupled photo-sensor elements, each of said photo-sensor elements comprises a substrate of one conductivity type with an insulating layer thereon, a first electrode on the insulating layer having a first electrode portion spaced from the substrate by a thickness of said insulating layer for defining, in combination with a potential applied to the first electrode, a first region in the substrate which is a potential well for minority charge carriers therein, a second electrode in the insulating layer having second and third electrode portions which are respectively adjacent to and remote from the first electrode, and which are spaced from the substrate by different thicknesses of the insulating layer for defining, in combination with a potential applied to the second electrode, adjacent second and third regions in the substrate which are respectively a potential barrier to the potential well in the first region and a potential well for the minority charge carriers relative to the potential barrier of the second region, and a third electrode in the insulating layer spaced from the substrate and second electrode by the insulating layer and having a fourth electrode portion overlapping the third electrode portion, with at least one of the second and third electrodes having a cutout portion cooperating with an adjacent portion of the other of such electrodes to define an opening above the aforementioned first region which is a potential well.

Semiconductor image sensor having CCD shift register

An oxygen or nitrogen ion beam is implanted into a polycrystalline silicon or in an amorphous silicon layer, or a single crystal device body or layer, on a semiconductor substrate to an extent sufficient to convert the polycrystalline silicon layer, the amorphous layer or the single crystal device body or layer into a semi-insulating layer having a resistivity of 10.sup.7 to 10.sup.11 ohm-cm, which has improved passivation property.

Method of manufacturing a semi-insulating silicon layer

Silicon ions are implanted in a silicon dioxide layer on a silicon substrate so that the dioxide layer is converted into a semi-insulating layer having an improved passivation property.

A solid-state video camera employing a plurality of image sensing means in the form of charge coupled device chips which are arranged in such a manner that the video image cast on respective chips are displaced by distance equal to .tau.H/N where .tau..sub.H is the reciprocal of the image sampling frequency, also referred to as the alignment pitch of the picture elements in the horizontal direction and N is the number of charge coupled chips. After converting the images into electrical signals, read-out timings of given picture elements of respective chips are shifted in time in accordance with the shift in distance between the images on the respective chips prior to mixing the output signals. In this way a video output signal having a wide-band width is obtained. In addition, color video information is possible by the use of color filters which may be disposed in front of the respective charge coupled chips.

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Yokohama, Japan

Tadayoshi Mifune