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MultiCam Boards Documentation > MultiCam Documentation > MultiCam User Guide > General Topics > Line-Scan Inspection Topics > The CCD Sensor
The CCD Sensor

The heart of the line-scan camera is an opto-electronic semiconductor device called a CCD (Charge Coupled Device). More precisely, a line CCD is involved, as opposed to the area CCD used in the area scan cameras.

A line CCD sensor is a set of light sensitive elements aligned on a small piece of silicon. Each element correspond to a pixel. Some dedicated electronic circuitry is associated to extract the data measured by the individual elements and send it outside the device during the readout process.

In the line-scan based system, the CCD is aligned along the crossweb direction.

The following figure highlights some important dimensional features of the CCD sensor.

The CCD pixel crossweb dimension is also called the CCD pitch.

Usually, the CCD pixel has the same crossweb and downweb dimension, i.e. the sensitive area for an individual pixel is square.

A typical size for a CCD pixel is in the order of magnitude of 10 by 10 µm.

The number of pixels for currently available CCD sensors and line-scan cameras is in the range of 200 to 12,000.

As an example, a typical CCD sensor could have 2048 pixels, each sized 14x14 µm. In this case, the overall length of the CCD sensitive area is 28.67 mm.