A Low Dark Current 160 dB DR Logarithmic Pixel

MDPI paper "A Low Dark Current 160 dB Logarithmic Pixel with Low Voltage Photodiode Biasing" is written by 2 authors with 4 affiliations: Alessandro Michel Brunetti and Bhaskar Choubey from University of Oxford, Universität Siegen, Fraunhofer Institute of Microelectronics Circuits and Systems, and Absensing.

"A typical logarithmic pixels suffer from poor performance under low light conditions due to a leakage current, usually referred to as the dark current. In this paper, we propose a logarithmic pixel design capable of reducing the dark current through low-voltage photodiode biasing, without introducing any process modifications. The proposed pixel combines a high dynamic range with a significant improvement in the dark response compared to a standard logarithmic pixel. The reported experimental results show this architecture to achieve an almost 35 dB improvement at the expense of three additional transistors, thereby achieving an unprecedented dynamic range higher than 160 dB."