Patent 7369167 was granted and assigned to Micron Technology on May, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A CMOS image pixel array formed on a chip is used for storing programmed information within the pixel array. Manufacturing lot and other data is written to the array during manufacturing and testing by applying a laser to pixels to render the photodiode defective. The programmed data is read from the pixel array using existing circuitry.