Low-power low-noise analog circuits for on-focal-plane signal processing of infrared sensors

Bedabrata Pain; Sunetra K. Mendis; Robert C. Schober; Robert H. Nixon; Eric R. Fossum

doi:10.1117/12.158688

20 October 1993 Low-power low-noise analog circuits for on-focal-plane signal processing of infrared sensors

Bedabrata Pain, Sunetra K. Mendis, Robert C. Schober, Robert H. Nixon, Eric R. Fossum

Proceedings Volume 1946, Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation; (1993) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.158688
Event: Optical Engineering and Photonics in Aerospace Sensing, 1993, Orlando, FL, United States

Abstract

On-focal-plane signal processing circuits for enhancement of IR imager performance are presented. To enable the detection of high background IR images, an in-pixel current-mode background suppression scheme is presented. The background suppression circuit consists of a current memory placed in the feedback loop of a CTIA and is designed for a thousand-fold suppression of the background flux, thereby easing circuit design constraints, and assuring BLIP operation even with detectors having large response non-uniformities. For improving the performance of low-background IR imagers, an on-chip column-parallel analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is presented. The design of a 10-bit ADC with 50 micrometers pitch and based on sigma-delta ((Sigma) -(Delta) ) modulation is presented. A novel IR imager readout technique featuring photoelectron counting in the unit cell is presented for ultra-low background applications. The output of the unit cell is a digital word corresponding to the incident flux density and the readout is noise free. The design of low-power (< 5 (mu) W), sub-electron input-referred noise, high-gain (> 100,000), small real estate (60 micrometers pitch) self-biased CMOS amplifiers required for photon counting are presented.

Citation Download Citation

Bedabrata Pain, Sunetra K. Mendis, Robert C. Schober, Robert H. Nixon, and Eric R. Fossum "Low-power low-noise analog circuits for on-focal-plane signal processing of infrared sensors", Proc. SPIE 1946, Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation, (20 October 1993); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.158688

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