TRIMMING SMART IMAGERS FOR AN IMAGE CONVERTER WITH A NONVOLATILE ANALOG MEMORY

Trimming of the pixels in an image converter is presented in this work . It is based on the tunnel effect and can be used simultaneously for many pixels with only one common trimming control for all the pixels. The charge injection control is done locally, automatically and indepe ndently in each pixel, so the trimming time is independent of the numb er of pixels. A prototype of this image converter has been fabricated in a CMOS 2.4 mu m technology and the experimental results show that t he trimming is efficient and that the linearity of the converted image is unchanged.