COSMOS large format 64Mpixel CMOS camera for ground-based astronomy

<p>This paper presents methodologies for suppressing the spatial and the temporal noise in a CMOS image sensor (CIS). First of all, it demonstrates by using a longer-length column bias transistor, both the fixed pattern noise (FPN) and temporal noise can be suppressed. Meantime, it employs column-level oversampling delta-sigma ADCs to suppress temporal noise as well as to facilitate the realization of the thermal compensation of dark signal non-uniformity (DSNU). In addition, the image pixels are re-configured as temperature sensors with inaccuracies within ±0.65 °C, between -20 and 80 °C. If the dark current and its non-uniformities are caused by thermal gradients, the obtained in-pixel thermal information can be employed to compensate for the measured dark current by 95 % and DSNU, up to 13 %. All the column-level 13 bit 2 <sup>nd</sup>-order incremental delta-sigma ADCs are measured with SNR around 65 dB and INL around 1.5 LSB, when tested with a -8 dB input signal and sampling at 2 MHz with an oversampling ratio (OSR) of 128, when the full scale voltage is 2 Vp-p. The 4T Pinned Photodiode (PPD) CIS is measured to have a temporal noise of 34~\\mu \\text{V} rms (with an OSR of 128, or, an input referred temporal noise of 0.5 e <sup>-</sup> rms, with a conversion gain, CG, of 73~\\mu \\text{V}/ \\text{e}^{-} ), a column gain FPN of 0.06 %, a dynamic range (DR) of 92 dB (with OSR = 512), as well as a linearity of 1 %. It has a measured DSNU of 3.2 %, after the thermal compensation using the in-pixel temperature sensors, a dark current of 290 pA/cm <sup>2</sup> and 15 pA/cm <sup>2</sup>, measured at 60 °C, before and after the thermal compensation, respectively. </p>

In this project we developed a radiation hard CMOS sensor architecture for High Energy Colliders. The key accomplishments were: 1. Developed a sensor architecture to support very high occupancy rate and hit rates 2. Developed, simulated (TCAD), and fabricated 20 different types of pixelated test structures for the quadruple well high resistivity substrate process. Measured performance of these pixel test structures; Dark currents were found to be close to physical limits; and Quantum efficiency were found to be close to ideal as well 3. Defined the scope for the PDK for the quadruple well process on high resistivity silicon Highlights of the new architecture are: Readout of pixel arrays with reconstruction efficiency >99% at hit rates of 500 MHits/cm2 and array occupancy of 0.2%; Minimization of in-pixel signal storage requirement (data will be read out at frame rates of 1MHz); Low power dissipation through integration of fragmented projection architecture (Minimum analog power dissipation); Pixel array level data reduction (Hit location is encoded through shape of sub-block projections); Programmable resolution and frame rate (Pixels can be binned to increase frame rate); Minimum data overhead, encoded projection results for all sub-blocks are read out without location information

A temperature-resistant 1/3 inch SVGA (800×600 pixels) 5.6 μm pixel pitch wide-dynamic-range (WDR) CMOS image sensor has been developed using a lateral-over-flow-integration-capacitor (LOFIC) in a pixel. The sensor chips are fabricated through 0.18 μm 2P3M process with totally optimized front-end-of-line (FEOL) & back-end-of-line (BEOL) for a lower dark current. By implementing a low electrical field potential design for photodiodes, reducing damages, recovering crystal defects and terminating interface states in the FEOL+BEOL, the dark current is improved to 12 e- /pixel-sec at 60 deg.C with 50% reduction from the previous very-low-dark-current (VLDC) FEOL and its contribution to the temporal noise is improved. Furthermore, design optimizations of the readout circuits, especially a signal-and noise-hold circuit and a programmable-gain-amplifier (PGA) are also implemented. The measured temporal noise is 2.4 e-rms at 60 fps (:36 MHz operation). The dynamic-range (DR) is extended to 100 dB with 237 ke- full well capacity. In order to secure the temperature-resistance, the sensor chip also receives both an inorganic cap onto micro lens and a metal hermetic seal package assembly. Image samples at low & high temperatures show significant improvement in image qualities.© (2008) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Influence of shallow versus deep etching on dark current and quantum efficiency in InAs/GaSb superlattice photodetectors and focal plane arrays for long wavelength infrared detection

This paper presents the world's smallest <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$2.988 \mu ~\mathrm{m}$</tex> pixel pitch, 3-megapixel (Mp) 3-stacked digital pixel sensor (DPS) with a low temporal random noise (RN) of 1.22 e-rms and a high dynamic range (HDR) of 110 dB in global-shutter operation mode for various applications. To achieve the low RN and HDR performances, a pixel-parallel analog-to-digital converter (P-ADC) architecture with a narrow noise bandwidth (BW) and split photodiode (PD) structure with the signal chopping operation for LED flicker mitigation (LFM) are utilized for the developed DPS, respectively. Especially, a 3 -stacked structure has been adopted for the small form factor of DPS and enhancing the on-chip image signal processing capability.

High-quality infrared focal plane arrays (FPAs) are used in many satellite, astronomical, and terrestrial applications. These applications require highly-sensitive, low-noise FPAs, and therefore do not benefit from advances made in low-cost thermal imagers where reducing cost and enabling high-temperature operation drive device development. Infrared detectors used in FPAs have been made for decades from alloys of mercury cadmium telluride (MCT). These infrared detectors are nearing the believed limit of their performance. This limit, known in the infrared detector community as Rule 07, dictates the dark current floor for MCT detectors, in their traditional architecture, for a given temperature and cutoff wavelength. To overcome the bounds imposed by Rule 07, many groups are working on detector compounds other than MCT. We focus on detectors employing III-V-based gallium-free In As Sb superlattice active regions while also changing the basic architecture of the pixel to improve signal-to-noise. Our architecture relies on a resonant, metallic, subwavelength nanoantenna patterned on the absorber surface, in combination with a Fabry-Perot cavity, to couple the incoming radiation into tightly confined modes near the nanoantenna. This confinement of the incident energy in a thin layer allows us to greatly reduce the volume of the absorbing layer to a fraction of the free-space wavelength, yielding a corresponding reduction in dark current from spontaneously generated electron-hole pairs in the absorber material. This architecture is detector material agnostic and could be applied to MCT detector structures as well, although we focus on using superlattice antimonide-based detector materials. This detector concept has been applied to both mid-wave (3–5 μm) and longwave (8–12 μm) infrared detectors and absorbers. Here we examine long-wave devices, as these detectors currently have a larger gap between desired device performance and that of currently existing detectors. The measured structures show an external quantum efficiency exceeding 50%. We present a comparison of the modeled and measured photoresponse of these detectors and compare these detectors to currently available commercial detectors using relevant metrics such as external quantum efficiency. We also discuss modeling of crosstalk between adjacent pixels and its influence on the potential for a dual-wavelength detector. Finally, we evaluate potential advances in these detectors that may occur in the near future.

For diffusion limited nBn detectors, using an absorption layer much thinner than the optical attenuation length and minority carrier diffusion length can improve the dark current. As the absorber thickness decreases, the lower dark current increases the signal-to-noise ratio to provide greater sensitivity or higher temperature operation. However, if the quantum efficiency (QE) also decreases with absorber thickness, the advantage of reduced dark current is eliminated. Here we discuss the use of a metallic grating to couple the incident light into laterally-propagating surface plasmon polariton (SPP) modes, so as to increase the effective absorption length. We fabricate the gratings using a deposited Ge layer, which provides a uniform grating profile without increasing the dark current. Using this process in conjunction with a 0.5 μm-thick InAsSb absorber lattice-matched to GaSb, we demonstrate an external QE of 34% for T = 78–240 K. An nBn structure with an InAs0.8Sb0.2 absorber that is grown metamorphically on GaSb using a step-graded InGaSb buffer has a peak external QE of 39% at 100 K, which decreases to 32% by 240 K. Finally, we demonstrate that a grating with SPP resonance near the bandgap extends the absorption band, and can potentially reduce the dark current by a factor of 3–8 in addition to the 5× reduction due to the thinner absorber.

In this paper, the non-ideal factors, which include spatial noise and temporal noise, are analyzed and suppressed in the high-speed spike-based image sensor, which combines the high-speed scanning sequential format with the method that uses the interspike time interval to indicate the scene information. In this imager, spatial noise contains device mismatch, which results in photo response non-uniformity (PRNU) and the non-uniformity of dark current. By multiplying the measured coefficient matrix the photo response non-uniformity is suppressed, and the non-uniformity of dark current is suppressed by correcting the interspike time interval based on the time interval of dark current. The temporal noise is composed of the shot noise and thermal noise. This kind of noise can be eliminated when using the spike frequency to restore the image. The experimental results show that, based on the spike frequency method, the standard deviation of the image decreases from 18.4792 to 0.5683 in the uniform bright light by using the calibration algorithm. While in the relatively uniform dark condition, the standard deviation decreases from 1.5812 to 0.4516. Based on interspike time interval method, because of time mismatch and temporal noise, the standard deviation of the image changes from 27.4252 to 27.4977 in the uniform bright light by using the calibration algorithm. While in the uniform dark condition, the standard deviation decreases from 2.361 to 0.3678.

Single-grain Silicon Technology for Large Area X-ray Imaging

Since 2005, in the scope of "DEFIR", the joint laboratory between CEA-LETI and SOFRADIR, p-on-n photodiodes and FPAs (Focal Plane Arrays) have been developed and optimised. This p-on-n architecture, obtained by As implantation into an In doped base layer, offered a significant decrease of the dark current compared to our n-on-p standard architecture. Following these developments, this p-on-n technology has been successfully transferred to SOFRADIR for industrial production [1]. Results obtained on TV format, 15μm pitch, showed that this first architecture has reached its maturity with excellent results in LWIR and MWIR. In parallel, further developments and studies are still in progress at CEA-LETI in order to improve the photodiode performance and understanding of the physical mechanisms. In this way, new p-on-n architectures have been studied on LPE (Liquid Phase Epitaxy) in the VLWIR spectral band. Using this new architecture, the transition temperature, where the dark current shifts from diffusion limited regime to another one, has been lowered by more than 10K. Extremely low dark current has been obtained, down to 50 e-/s/pixel. The p-on-n technology also been studied at DEFIR in SWIR range specifically for space applications were 2Kx2K MCT arrays are required with dark current below 0.01e-/s at 18μm pitch in the 80-140 K. Finally in the MWIR and LWIR spectral bands, the reduction of production cost and the increase of resolution call for smaller pixel pitches with larger format. In this way, first results have been obtained on test diodes with pixel pitch as low as 5 μm. The I(V) and R(V) plots illustrate the very good characteristic of our p-on-n diodes. These photodiodes present large reverse breakdown voltage, witnessing the quality of our device fabrication procedure.

A novel phase-detection auto focus (PDAF) technique for incident 850 nm plane wave is demonstrated using Ge-on-Si layer and deep trench isolation (DTI), which are locally arranged on light receiving surface (LRS) of crystalline silicon (c-Si). No metal light shielding film (LSF) for pupil division is formed. The key concept of the present work for PDAF is to perform the pupil division by the locally arranged Geon-Si layer in a pixel according to incident angle. The present pixel is based on a back-side illuminated CMOS image sensor pixel; the pixel pitch is 1.85 μm and the thickness of c-Si is around 3 μm. The simulation, based on three-dimensional finite difference time domain (3D-FDTD) method, shows that the external quantum efficiency (EQE) of the present pixel exhibits above 44.3 % with the maximum of 76.0 % for incident angles of - 30° to + 30°, owing to the selectively arranged Ge-on-Si layer; it exhibits 3.6 times improvement in the EQE at normal incidence compared to that of current state-of-the-art pixel with half metal-shielded aperture; the EQE is 49.2 % and 13.8 %, respectively. The present technique can enhance the accuracy of AF under low-illuminated condition.

One of the main challenges of modern astronomical instruments like adaptive optics (AO) systems or fringe trackers is to deal with the very low photons flux detection scenarios. The typical timescale of atmospheric turbulences being in the range of some tens of milliseconds, infrared wavefront sensors for AO systems needs frame rates higher than 1 KHz leading to integration times lower than 1 ms. This integration time associated with a low irradiance results in a few number of integrated photons per frame per pixel. To preserve the information coming from this weak signal, the focal plane array (FPA) has to present a low read out noise, a high quantum efficiency and a low dark current. Up to now, the output noise of high speed near infrared sensors is limited by the silicon read out circuit noise. The use of HgCdTe avalanche photodiodes with high gain at moderate reverse bias and low excess noise seems then a logical way to reduce the impact of the read noise on images signal to noise ratio. These low irradiance passive imaging applications with integration times in the millisecond range needs low photodiode dark current and low background current. These requirements lead to the choice of the photodiode cut off wavelength. The short wave infrared (SWIR) around 3 μm is a good compromise between the gain that can be obtain for a given APD bias and the background and dark current. The CEA LETI HgCdTe APD technology, and a fine analysis of the gain curve characteristic are presented in [1] and won’t be detailed here. The response time of the APD is also a key factor for a high frame rate FPA. This parameter has been evaluated in [2] and the results shows cut off frequencies in the GHz range. In this communication we report the performances of a SWIR APD FPA designed and fabricated by CEA LETI and SOFRADIR for astrophysical applications. This development was made in the frame of RAPID, a 4 years R&D project funded by the French FUI (Fond Unique Interministeriel). This project involves industrial and academic partners from the field of advanced infrared focal plane arrays fabrication (SOFRADIR and CEA LETI) and of astronomical/defense institutes (IPAG, LAM, ONERA). The goal of this program is to develop a fast and low noise SWIR camera for astronomical fast applications like adaptive optics wavefront sensing and fringe tracking for astronomical interferometers [3]. The first batch of FPA’s was based on liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE) grown photodiode arrays with 3 μm cut off wavelength. In order to get higher avalanche gain for a given photodiode reverse bias voltage, we have made a second batch with a cadmium composition leading to 3.3 μm cut off wavelength (λ c ). This paper described the read out circuit in the next section. The aim section III is to find the critical parameter that has to be measured to evaluate the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of an APD FPA. The main electro optical characteristics of an FPA based on 3.3μm cut off wavelength APDs are reported in “Rapid FPAs characterisation” section. The dark current evolution with temperature of a 3 μm FPA high and low APD bias is also detailed in this section.

Atomic-level chemical reaction promoting external quantum efficiency of organic photomultiplication photodetector exceeding 108% for weak-light detection

In this paper, results from the development of InAs/GaSb superlattice focal plane arrays (FPAs) at IRnova will be presented. A versatile and robust detector design is used that allows for adjustment of the detection cut-off wavelength from 2.5 μm up to 14.5 μm with only minor changes in the detector design. Performance of the fabricated detectors has been reviewed in terms of external quantum efficiency (EQE), dark current and noise for three designs with cut-off wavelengths of 4, 5.5 and 11 μm at 80 K (referred to as DEEP BLUE, RED HOT and VLWIR, respectively). Measurements on the 15 μm sized photodiodes demonstrated 70% EQE for the MWIR designs, and almost 40% - for VLWIR. At the same time, the dark current stayed close to the Rule07 benchmark for all studied samples. Noise mechanisms have been discussed and their relation to the passivation was examined. Mature in-house processing and passivation technique of resulted in very high spatial uniformity of VGA focal plane arrays (FPAs), i.e. low relative deviations of EQE (< 6%) and of dark current density (< 12%) and narrow noise distributions for both RED HOT and DEEP BLUE FPAs. We show also that <99.5% of these arrays operate close to the fundamental noise limit.

A lower sideband E-band mixer for radio astronomy is designed with consideration of the power compression. An E-band receiver for astronomy is analyzed to derive the power linearity specification of the mixer. The theory of noise-temperature error due to the power compression is derived. The analysis reveal that receiver with very low noise temperature is much more sensitive to the power saturation. Based on the analysis, the power compression of the mixer is set to less than 2% (0.088 dB), thus the mixer IP <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1dB</sub> should be at least 11 dB higher than the input power to meet the requirement of the receiver with 30-60-K noise temperature. The transistor sizes were explored in the design of the modified cascode mixer to provide sufficient IP <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1dB</sub> and conversion gain. The designed broadband mixer is with IP <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1dB</sub> higher than 3 dBm. This performance is suitable for the E-band astronomical heterodyne receiver applications.