First measurement of the in-pixel electron multiplying with a standard imaging CMOS technology: Study of the EMCMOS concept

Scientific low light imaging devices benefit today from designs for pushing the mean noise to the single electron level. When readout noise reduction reaches its limit, signal-to-noise ratio improvement can be driven by an electron multiplication process, driven by impact ionization, before adding the readout noises. This concept already implemented in CCD structures using extra-pixel shift registers can today be integrated inside each pixel in CMOS technology. The EBCMOS group at IPNL is in charge of the characterization of new prototypes developed by E2V using this concept: the electron multiplying CMOS (EMCMOS). The CMOS technology enables electron multiplication inside the photodiode itself, and thus, an overlap of the charge integration and multiplication. A new modeling has been developed to describe the output signal mean and variance after the impact ionization process in such a case. In this paper the feasibility of impact ionization process inside a 8μm-pitch pixel is demonstrated. The new modeling is also validated by data and a value of 0.32% is obtained for the impact ionization parameter α with an electric field intensity of 24V/μm.