Proton irradiation-induced random telegraph signal noise in a 2 k × 2 k 4T CMOS active pixel sensor: Testing, detection, and modeling

This paper presents our recent study progress on proton-irradiated-induced random telegraph signal (RTS) in a high-resolution CMOS active pixel sensor (APS). First, RTS waveforms of a commercial 2k × 2 k 4T CMOS APS chip in 180-nm CMOS technology are tested under the 10-MeV proton irradiation. Second, a novel adaptive automatic detection method (AADM) based on real-time thresholds is proposed for the sequential processing of a large batch of RTS pixels. Real-time thresholds and two-stage reconstruction algorithms are employed to improve the validity and correctness of RTS reconstruction. The proposed detection method which can realize the batch autoprocessing by using an adaptive filter will improve the detection efficiency. Third, a new approach to model the RTS maximum transition amplitude distribution is presented. It has been proven that the double exponential distribution can fit the RTS maximum transition amplitude distribution better. Two models are proposed to predict the contributions due to the ionizing effects and displacement damage effects. Finally, the error analysis is given. The errors between the simulated data of the proposed models and experimental results are all less than 5.5 %.