Readout Integrated Circuit for Low Cost Infrared Focal Plane Arrays

Sensor Creations will design, fabricate, and test two ROICs with a common digital backend for readout of SWIR and MWIR detector arrays at elevated temperatures. The readouts will be designed for operation of detector materials, like PbS Colloidal Quantum Dots (CQD) in the SWIR regime and PbSe photoconductors in the MWIR regime that can be deposited onto fully processed CMOS wafers. CQDs have been demonstrated to achieve a D* performance > 2E11 Jones up to a wavelength of 1.8micron. PbSe photoconductors can achieve a D* performance of >2E10 Jones at operating temperatures >250K when modulated with a 10 kHz bias frequency. The optimum ROIC for CQD operation must have minimum noise and a small pixel pitch while the challenge for the MWIR ROIC is to maximize the effective Full Well Capacity (FWC). In this program we will develop a medium resolution SWIR band ROIC and a smaller resolution MWIR ROIC with twice the pixel pitch and >2Ge- FWC, based on pixel level digitization. At the end of this program these lower cost FPAs will be available for integration into uncooled SWIR and MWIR cameras with lower SWaP compared to currently existing solutions.