Sensitivity and crosstalk study of the zero gap microlens used in 3.2 μm active pixel image sensors

The microlens has been widely applied to improve the sensitivity and to decrease the spatial crosstalk of image sensors. In order to further decrease the pixel size while improve the image quality, the zero gap microlens has been proposed to make high performance image sensors. In this paper, both the traditional microlens and zero gap microlens are fabricated using TOWER and TOPPAN processes. And their performances are compared and evaluated. The results show that the least sensitivity of the zero gap microlens has been significantly improved by more than 45.8% compared to that of the traditional microlens. The use of the zero gap microlens results in an obvious decrease of the crosstalk among blue, green and red lights. For example, the crosstalk of blue light in red light under the green irradiation has been decreases about 1.33%, and the crosstalk of red light in blue light under the blue irradiation has showed about 2.429 times decrease. Overall, the output colour image of the zero gap microlens is brighter and clearer than that of the traditional microlens. Image quality has been significantly improved due to the use of the zero gap microlens.