English to French Law/Patents Engineering (general) imaging

For such applications, the conventional technology consists of fast electronic shutters made by means of the so-called gating of the operating voltage of photocathodes in image intensifiers of which the output is optically coupled to the electronic image sensor (either CCD or CMOS based).

The sensor pixel architecture disclosed can be used in a variety of gated imaging applications, like for example for imaging photons from a scene or other event directly into the solid state image sensor made in Si for use in the wavelength range from 200 to 1 100 nm, either front or back illuminated or made in lnGaAs or another Ill-V compound semiconductor for use in the wavelength range from 700 to 1900 nm. Especially eye-safe laser range gating at -1500 nanometre is a likely candidate.

In conventional electron bombarded active pixels sensors, gating operation requires that a very high voltage must be very rapidly switched on and off. The new pixel architecture in this case no longer requires to gate at a high repetition rate the high operating voltage but does so at modest TTL level voltages.
in applications where information in an image is contained not only in the spatial intensity distribution but also in the arrival time of photons, the ability to use a fast electronic shutter is of great importance. In such applications,
10 like for example laser range gated imaging (LIDAR) or for example Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging of molecular samples, the arrival time of photons in the image relative to the timing of a pulsed excitation source is determined by the speed of light in the atmosphere for LIDAR and by decay times of molecular processes for FLI.