An important concept describing the basic layout of a sensor: photons incident on a silicon semiconductor(pixel) release a certain number of electrons, which are detected as a charge. This is followed by an amplifier, which measures the magnitude of the charge, and then an ADC converter, which converts the analogue signal into a digital signal.

There are three basic CCD sensor architectures:

  1. Full Frame CCD
  2. Frame Transfer CCD
  3. Interline CCD