Framos and Pyxalis Partner on Customized Sensor Design

Pyxalis and Framos partner to offer a customizable image sensor design based on Pyxalis HDPYX sensor. The sensor is designed as a modular platform rather than a fully custom sensor, the device is made to adapt to various types of scientific and surveillance applications. Scalable in terms of number of spectral bands, dedicated grading filters can be deposited directly on the sensor if required. In terms of packaging, the basic package is BGA type but custom ceramic is also offered. The sensor can also be tuned in term of wavelength as Thick EPI for NIR, ultra-tick EPI for direct X-ray and backside illuminated versions are all currently envisaged. As it is designed to be modified, each derivation of the platform is much cheaper than full-custom version while maintaining unique performance parameters.

The sensor platform was manufactured in Tower Jazz 180nm technology and characterized at Pyxalis lab.

The HDPYX platform is capable of integrating multiple HDR techniques to reach up to 120dB linear DR. Combining a dual gain with charge conservation pixel allows the HDPYX sensor to capture image linearly up to 90dB. To reach 120dB, the HDPYX sensor uses two different integration times: one for odd lines and one for even lines. Both integration times end at the same moment, with the transfer of the data from the photodiode to the floating diffusions.

Secondly, the unique feature is a true Dual-Core image sensor, running two 32bits micro-processors to operate the device. The frame management core takes care of every aspect linked to the operating mode of the sensor, such as shutter type, windowing, subsampling and integration time calculation. The line management core takes care of the black level correction, ADC driving, data formatting and HDR reconstruction.

Pyxalis presentation at EI2016 gives more details on the new platform:

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