Design and Development of High Performance UV Imaging Focal Plane Arrays

Magnolia Proposes to design, optimize and demonstrate small-pixel Gallium Nitride based Ultraviolet (UV) Avalanche Photo Diodes (APD) for solar blind UV imaging and applications. As part of the proposed phase I effort, we will model the sensor performance with detector size of approximately five (5) microns unit cell size and also ranging from as large as 30 um to 5um unit cells. We will model read-out integrated circuit (ROIC) designs consistent with state of the art imaging array technology, establishing the basis for mega-pixel UV arrays. Magnolia plans to demonstrate state of the art small pixel UV APD’s that have low noise and high gain. We propose to use MOCVD growth technique to fabricate GaN / AlGaN based UV APD’s. We also plan to develop Read-out integrated circuit (ROIC) design that will allow for efficient injection of charge from the detector and with the characteristics associated with state of the art imaging with low noise and high dynamic range.