Spectroscopic CMOS sensor

CMOS image sensor to which the market expansion has been accelerated in recent years is installed in the cellular phone and the digital SLR camera. For these applications, the miniaturization, the high quality images and a high resolution are requested. It is necessary to install a lot of pixels in the limited module size to meet such a demand. The downscaling of CMOS processes makes a demand, however reducing a pixel size make fill factor lower and distance from photodiodes to lens longer.

We proposed to reproduce the color filter by using the interconnect layer by one of the methods by which the distance of the photodiode and the lens was able to be shortened. It is researched to acquire the color image in adjusting light transmission characteristics of the interconnect layer with a metal mesh. We designed the new structure for color recognition by a standard CMOS65nm process technology and verified with an optical simulator.