High Speed CMOS Image Sensor Circuits for Streak Photography

Focusing schlieren photography in a scanning arrangement is ideal for visualizing shock waves of hypersonic objects moving in one dimension. The frame rates of existing line scan sensors are limited by the readout circuits to approximately 100,000 frames per second - far too slow for Mach 10 rocket sled tests. We propose to develop a new type of CMOS architecture that avoids the readout bottleneck by storing frames on the sensor chip itself. The feasibility of this architecture has already been demonstrated for a small prototype. In this project, we intend to develop a larger prototype sensor and incorporate it into an all solid-state streak camera. This camera has the potential to capture frames at rates exceeding 10 million frames per second, more than an order of magnitude faster than present streak cameras, and will be ideal for applications where a brief record length will suffice.