"Image sensors with nondestructive charge readout provide single-photon or single-electron sensitivity, but at the cost of long readout times. We present a smart readout technique to allow the use of these sensors in visible-light and other applications that require faster readout times. The method optimizes the readout noise and time by changing the number of times pixels are read out either statically, by defining an arbitrary number of regions of interest (ROI) in the array, or dynamically, depending on the charge or energy of interest (EOI) in the pixel. This technique is tested in a Skipper CCD showing that it is possible to obtain deep sub-electron noise, and therefore, high resolution of quantized charge, while dynamically changing the readout noise of the sensor. These faster, low noise readout techniques show that the skipper CCD is a competitive technology even where other technologies such as Electron Multiplier Charge Coupled Devices (EMCCD), silicon photo multipliers, etc. are currently used. This technique could allow skipper CCDs to benefit new astronomical instruments, quantum imaging, exoplanet search and study, and quantum metrology."
This is an interesting skipper CCD paper where the # of samples per pixel can be dynamically varied from 1 to 500 to reduce effective read noise to DSERN levels by averaging. When the authors publish in an archival peer-reviewed journal I hope they provide a table of performance parameters. Of course it is a bit annoying that they leave out reference recent CIS-QIS work (or any QIS work for that matter) such as the 0.19e- rms read noise in the 16Mpixel CMOS sensor operating at about room temperature at about 40fps reported in this blog in April 2021. http://image-sensors-world.blogspot.com/2021/04/gigajot-achieves-019e-readout-noise-in.html. If the QIS was operated at 140K I am guessing that even better performance would be achieved. At least, it deserves a reference.
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