Picture perfect

A type of megapixel image sensor developed by scientists at Andor Technology in Northern Ireland, Fairchild Imaging in the US and PCO in Germany made its debut at the Laser Conference and Exhibition in Munich this week.

Since its inception, CMOS image sensor (CIS) technology has held great potential to become the detector of choice for many scientific imaging applications. These demanding fields require a unique combination of sensitivity, speed, dynamic range, resolution and field of view.

However, although CIS technology has steadily improved, it has not fully realised its potential, with charge-coupled device (CCD) and, more recently, electron-multiplying charge-coupled device (EMCCD) detectors remaining the choice for the majority of high-end scientific imaging applications.

That is because the performance of traditional CIS devices has generally been worse than CCDs and their acceptance into scientific markets has been limited owing to a reputation of unacceptably high read noise and dark current, lower fill factors and greater non-uniformity.