Resolution and light sensitivity tradeoff with pixel size

When the size of a CMOS imaging sensor array is fixed, the only way to increase sampling density and spatial resolution is to reduce pixel size. But reducing pixel size reduces the light sensitivity. Hence, under these constraints, there is a tradeoff between spatial resolution and light sensitivity. Because this tradeoff involves the interaction of many different system components, we used a full system simulation to characterize performance. This paper describes system simulations that predict the output of imaging sensors with the same dye size but different pixel sizes and presents metrics that quantify the spatial resolution and light sensitivity for these different imaging sensors.