Design of a Readout Integrated Circuit (ROIC) for Infrared Imaging Applications

There has been a growing interest in using Infrared (IR) imaging systems in various applications ranging from medical diagnosis to military surveillance. The quality of the IR imaging systems depends on 1) the sensitivity of the Focal Plane Arrays (FPA) as the transducer of the electromagnetic wave and 2) the Readout Integrated Circuit (ROIC) that provides the pixel data to the processing unit. In this thesis, we describe specific ROIC designed for a dual-band IR imaging system. In particular, we focus on the ROIC part and propose an efficient circuit that meets several design objectives, including minimum power, minimum cost, and maximum dynamic range. We start with analog design of different parts of the circuit based upon a bottom-up design discipline. We then validate our design using TSpice simulation and analyzing the time/frequency response of the circuit at each step. Next, we proceed with layout design, where we present our final ROIC layout designed using Tanner EDA tools. Finally, we explain the ROIC test bed developed at the Center for High Technology Materials (CHTM), University of New Mexico, which can be used to test Indigo-based IR imaging systems as well as our designed ROIC

Current mode read-out circuit for InGaAs photodiode applications

International audienceInfrared focal plane arrays have many military, industrial, medical, and scientific applications that require high-resolution and high-performance read-out electronics. In applications involving InGaAs sensor arrays, data read-out can be carried out by circuits implemented with View the MathML source CMOS technology. In this paper we propose a dynamically regulated cascode current mirror for pixel read-out. From simulation results, we expect this circuit to achieve a better trade-off between silicon area, signal-to-noise ratio, and output dynamic range than the trade-off that is currently achieved by current mode CMOS read-out circuits