Patent ID: 7910965

Claim:
An image sensor comprising: a plurality of photoelectric conversion elements arranged in a matrix; a plurality of floating diffusion regions shared by respective corresponding pairs of adjacent ones of the plurality of photoelectric conversion elements; a plurality of charge-transmission lines which extend in a row direction of the matrix and respectively correspond to a plurality of pairs of adjacent ones of rows of photoelectric conversion elements; and a plurality of vertical signal lines extending in a column direction of the matrix and corresponding to respective corresponding columns of ones of the plurality of photoelectric conversion elements, further comprising a plurality of row selection lines extending in the row direction and respectively corresponding to the plurality of pairs of adjacent rows of photoelectric conversion elements, wherein: the matrix comprises a 2m×n matrix; a number of photoelectric conversion elements comprises 2m×n; a number of floating diffusion regions comprises m×n; a number of charge-transmission lines comprises (m+1); a number of row selection lines comprises m; and a number of vertical lines comprises n.