Approach to deinterleave parallel row reads in image sensors

Abstract

The technology involves imaging devices, such as image sensors and imaging systems, providing methods of performing parallel readout of two or more rows of image pixels of such devices. This includes a deinterleaving approach that exploits both row read interleaving and memory deinterleaving in order to reduce the memory requirement to convert the row read parallelism to a serialized row stream. Parallel readout can be applied to non-contiguous rows of pixels, including when subsampling or when two contiguous rows share floating diffusion. The process may include parallel row read deinterleaving of a stored image by performing time division multiplexing partial deinterleaving of selected rows when reading selected rows in parallel from a pixel array to order even rows of the selected rows sequentially and odd rows of the selected rows sequentially. A memory store can time-shift either the even or odd rows of the partially deinterleaved selected rows.