E2v Semiconductors

Teledyne E2v Semiconductors Sas

Vincent Prevost

Pierre Fereyre

Bruno Diasparra

Frédéric Mayer

Thierry Ligozat

Pascal Douine

The invention relates to color-image sensors. To benefit both from a good luminance resolution and a color accuracy that is not excessively degraded by the sensitivity of silicon to near-infrared radiation, the invention proposes to produce a mosaic of pixels comprising colored pixels (R), (G), (B), coated with color filters, which are distributed in the matrix, with white pixels (T) not coated with color filters and which are distributed in the matrix. The colored pixels include photodiodes constructed differently from the photodiodes of the white pixels, the different construction being such that the photodiodes of the colored pixels have a lower sensitivity to infrared radiation than the photodiodes of the white pixels.

Colour image sensor with white pixels and colour pixels

The invention relates to the production of images associating with each point of the image a depth, i.e. a distance between the observed point and the camera that produced the image. A light source emits N trains of light pulses. For each train of rank I=1 to N, charge is integrated in a short time slot of length Tthat starts with a temporal offset trelative to the pulse, this temporal offset representing a journey time of the light pulse between the light source and the sensor after reflection from a point placed a distance dfrom the sensor. The temporal offset tis the same for all the light pulses of the ipulse train but the temporal offsets tof the N trains are different from one another in order to correspond to various distances relative to the sensor. The charge photogenerated by the pulses of a given train is accumulated; then the accumulated charge is read in order to produce an image of rank i representing the pixels located at the distance d. The observation of a scene comprises producing N different images by virtue of which it is possible to associate a distance with each pixel.

Method for producing images with depth information and image sensor

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Seyssins, France

Vincent Prevost