The present disclosure relates to a comparator, an AD converter, a solid-state imaging device, an electronic apparatus, and a comparator control method that can reduce power consumption while increasing the determination speed of the comparator.

The comparator includes a comparison unit, a positive feedback circuit, and a current limiting unit. The comparison unit compares the voltage of an input signal and the voltage of a reference signal, and outputs a comparison result signal. The positive feedback circuit increases the transition speed at the time when the comparison result signal is inverted. The current limiting unit limits the current flowing in the comparison unit after the inversion of the comparison result signal. The present disclosure can be applied to comparators, for example.

The present technique relates to a solid-state imaging device, a solid-state imaging device manufacturing method, and an electronic apparatus that are capable of providing a solid-state imaging device that can prevent generation of RTS noise due to miniaturization of amplifying transistors, and can achieve a smaller size and a higher degree of integration accordingly. A solid-state imaging device (1-1) includes: a photodiode (PD) as a photoelectric conversion unit; a transfer gate (TG) that reads out charges from the photodiode (PD); a floating diffusion (FD) from which the charges of the photodiode (PD) are read by an operation of the transfer gate (TG); and an amplifying transistor (Tr3) connected to the floating diffusion (FD). More particularly, the amplifying transistor (Tr3) is of a fully-depleted type. Such an amplifying transistor includes an amplifier gate (AG) (gate electrode) extending in a direction perpendicular to convex strips (33) formed by processing a surface layer of a semiconductor layer (11), for example.

A mobile device method for certifying a mobile device includes: generating first fixed pattern noise (FPN) information based on column FPN of an image sensor included in the mobile device; and controlling the mobile device to perform a certification by using the first FPN information.

A unit pixel apparatus includes a unit pixel suitable for supporting initialization an output node and outputting a pixel signal corresponding to incident light through the output node; and a switching block suitable for initializing the output node and deciding an initial voltage of the output node.

In order to improve imaging performance, an imaging apparatus is provided to include an image capturing unit configured to detect incident light and generate a raw image data, a compression unit configured to compress the raw image data to generate a coded data having a data amount smaller than that of the raw image data, and an output unit configured to output the coded data to a processing unit for processing the coded data. Furthermore, the image capturing unit, the compression unit, and the output unit are configured to be within a same semiconductor package.

An electronic device is provided. The electronic device includes an image sensor including a plurality of unit pixels, each unit pixel including two or more individual pixels, and at least one processor. The at least one processor is configured to acquire a first image frame from the image sensor, determine a photographing environment of the electronic device, based on the first image frame, and, in response to the photographing environment corresponding to a first photographing environment, control the image sensor to acquire analog data through the individual pixels, and provide first digital data digitally converted from the analog data with first sensitivity, and second digital data digitally converted from the analog data with second sensitivity which is higher than the first sensitivity, and acquire a second image frame which follows the first image frame, based on the first digital data and the second digital data.

The present technology relates to a solid-state imaging device and an electronic apparatus that realize a high frame rate image capture without deteriorating an image quality. A floating diffusion holds a charge accumulated on one or more photoelectric conversion units. A plurality of amplification transistors read out a signal corresponding to the charge held by the floating diffusion. The signal read out by the amplification transistor is output to a vertical signal line. The plurality of amplification transistors are connected in parallel. The present technology is applicable to a CMOS image sensor, for example.

The present disclosure relates to a comparator, an AD converter, a solid-state imaging device, an electronic apparatus, and a comparator control method that can reduce power consumption while increasing the determination speed of the comparator. The comparator includes a comparison unit, a positive feedback circuit, and a current limiting unit. The comparison unit compares the voltage of an input signal and the voltage of a reference signal, and outputs a comparison result signal. The positive feedback circuit increases the transition speed at the time when the comparison result signal is inverted. The current limiting unit limits the current flowing in the comparison unit after the inversion of the comparison result signal. The present disclosure can be applied to comparators, for example.

An image sensor may have an array of image sensor pixels arranged in color filter unit cells each having one red image pixel that generates red image signals, one blue image pixel that generate blue image signals, and two clear image sensor pixels that generate white image signals. The image sensor may be coupled to processing circuitry that performs filtering operations on the red, blue, and white image signals to increase noise correlations in the image signals that reduce noise amplification when applying a color correction matrix to the image signals. The processing circuitry may extract a green image signal from the white image signal. The processing circuitry may compute a scaling value that includes a linear combination of the red, blue, white and green image signals. The scaling value may be applied to the red, blue, and green image signals to produce corrected image signals having improved image quality.

A first ramp signal having a potential which is changed with time in a first amplitude range in a first period and a second ramp signal in which a potential is changed with time in a second amplitude range which includes the first amplitude range and which has maximum amplitude larger than maximum amplitude of the first amplitude range and an amount of the change of the potential per unit time is the same as an amount of the change of the potential per unit time of the first ramp signal are generated, and comparison between an optical signal and the first ramp signal and comparison between the optical signal and the second ramp signal are performed in parallel.