Smart Infrared Focal Plane Arrays and Advanced Electronics

The SBIR MDA11-005 posted a well depth requirement of up to 50 Million electrons for a pixel pitch of 12um~20um to achieve the targeted high dynamic range, low noise and high resolution imaging goal. Initial calculations, given a commercial 0.18um/3.3V process, and using the entire pixel area at the maximum pixel pitch (20um), yields 24 Million electron well capacity when all the pixel area are taken to lay out the storage capacitor, with a presumed 2V voltage swing. Obviously, the traditional approach which uses a capacitor to store the whole photon induced charges accumulated in the integration to conduct the charge-voltage conversion is impossible to meet the goal. The challenge doesn"t stop there. The further requirement is to achieve low noise while realizing the large well depth. With traditional analog pixel design, these two requirements are actually contradicting with each other.