so that blooming cannot occur during readout in this mode of operation in addition the presence of the vod 14 suppresses cross talk between pixels antiblooming is controlled by adjusting the electrostatic barrier to the vod 14 such that it is deeper than the off potential for the transfer gate 16 for the case of fig1 a or transfer gate 26 for the case of fig1 b this will allow excess electrons generated by any bright object in the scene to spill into the vod 14 and not bloom into the floating diffusion 18 or floating diffusion 28 for the case of fig1 b or other areas of the same pixel or adjacent pixels and cause undesired blooming artifacts antiblooming control can be done similarly with a lateral overflow drain not shown using either a physical gate or a virtual gate adjacent to the photodiode the potential of the electrostatic barrier to the lateral overflow drain lod must also be deeper than that of the transfer gate this approach adversely affects the fill factor for a given pixel size since area must be allocated to the lod structure a vod provides blooming control without impacting fill electronic shuttering refers to the ability to shutter the imager without the need for a mechanical or electro optic device to block the incident light electronic shuttering is accomplished by having a light shielded charge storage region in each pixel floating diffusion 18 in this case of fig1 a storage region 38 for fig1 b and an overflow drain for the photodiode vod 14 in the case of the preferred embodiment being discussed herein as described in discussion relating to integration operation the shutter or integration.