I came across this great list of terminology that is useful when working with imagers—specifically CCDs. [Here] it is!
And the term that made me go googling: Binning-
Summing charge on the CCD and doing simple readout results in better noise performance than reading out several pixels and then summing them on the computer memory. This is because each act of reading out contributes to the noise.
There are two main variants of the binning process: vertical binning and horizontal binning. In addition there are several binning patterns that tailor the main binning variants to typical application usage. These are Full Vertical Binning, Single Track and Multi Track.
Other cool terms I learned about in my hunt-
Charge traps, Etaloning, Single-Track ..
One of my favorites is Cosmic rays (which I’ve long blamed for compiler errors)-
Very high energy particles from space enter the earth’s atmosphere and produce a shower of further high energy particles. When one of these particles passes through the CCD it will appear as a spike up to several handred counts. There are on average 1 event per 10 sec’s a sea level (This will vary with location).