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Thursday, July 18, 2024

Senseeker Expands Low-Noise Neon Digital Readout IC Family for SWIR Applications

The 10 µm, 1280 x 1024 Neon® RD0131 DROIC is available now for commercial use.


Santa Barbara, California (July 16 th , 2024) — Senseeker Corp, a leading innovator of digital infrared image sensing technology, has announced the availability of the Neon® RD0131, an advanced digital readout integrated circuit (DROIC) that expands the Neon product family with the addition of a high definition 1280 x 1024 format.

“The new larger format size of the Neon RD0131 is a welcome addition to the Neon DROIC family,” said Dr. Martin H. Ettenberg, President and CEO at Princeton Infrared Technologies. “Senseeker’s approach to offering families of compatible products allows reuse of test equipment, electronics and software, greatly simplifying the development of new high-performance SWIR cameras and imagers that we provide for the Industrial, Scientific and Defense markets.”

The Neon RD0131, with 1280 x 1024 format and 10 µm pitch has triple-gain modes with programmable well capacities of 22 ke-, 160 ke- and 1.1 Me-. The DROIC supports a read noise of 15 electrons at room temperature in high-gain.

“The Neon RD0131 CTIA DROIC is the second chip in our Neon product family that has proven to be a hit with customers that are developing solutions for low-light applications such as short-wave infrared (SWIR) and low-current technologies such as quantum dot-based detectors,” said Kenton Veeder, President of Senseeker. “We have included the popular features and operating modes that Senseeker isknown for, including on-chip temperature monitoring and programmable multiple high-speed windows to observe and track targets at thousands of frames per second.”

The Neon RD0131 is available in full or quarter wafers now and is supported by Senseeker’s CoaxSTACK™ electronics kit, CamIRa® imaging software and sensor test units (STUs) that, together, enable testing and evaluation of Neon-based focal plane arrays quickly and efficiently.

The Neon® RD0131-L10x is a low-noise, triple-gain digital readout integrated circuit (DROIC) that has a 10 µm pitch pixel with a capacitive transimpedance amplifier (CTIA) front-end circuit. This DROIC was developed for low-light applications such as short wave Infrared (SWIR) and low-current detector technologies such as quantum dot-based detectors. It has been designed for use in high operating temperature (HOT) conditions.

  • 10 μm , P-on-N polarity, CTIA input
  • Global snapshot, Integrate-while-read (IWR) operation
  • Three selectable gains with well capacity of 22 ke- (high-
  • gain), 160 ke- (medium-gain) and 1.1 Me- (low-gain)
  • Correlated Doubling Sampling (CDS) on and off chip
  • Advanced zero-signal noise floors of 15 e– rms (high-gain
  • using CDS, room temperature)
  • Synchronous or asynchronous integration control
  • High-speed windowing with multiple windows
  • Serialized to 16 bits per pixel (15 data, 1 valid flag bit)
  • SPI control interface (SenSPI®) and optional frame clock

 Neon RD0131 dies on wafer

 
Image of a bruised apple that uses the Neon ROIC with a short wave infrared (SWIR) detector.


 

7 comments:

  1. Is the AD conversion inside each pixel or on the pixel array sides please? Thanks

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  2. is the principle of such a device that the cathode of the photodiode of a layer placed on top of the roic is connected somehow to the roic, eg via microbump? and that everything apart of the photodiode is in the roic?

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    1. IR sensor is a hybridized device, the sensing device is a BSI photodiode array connected to CMOS readout circuit. In the case of InGaAs photodiodes are made with P diffusion in N sub.

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    2. maybe a stupid question ;-) what are the main reasons why transistors, i mean the other functions around the photodiode, the sourcefollower etc, cannot be made in the ingaas wafer? i assume it is possible to create ingaas transistors as well, but there must be good reasons why it is not done?

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    3. Not a stupid question --- lots of academic research going on on III-V transistors (InGaAs would be one example of a III-V semiconductor), but the technology is far from the level of maturity as silicon. https://medium.com/@sixsamuraisoldier/why-gaas-and-iii-vs-probably-wont-replace-silicon-568b4701901d

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  3. Indeed not a stupid question. It is interesting to reread the numerous articles relating to the trade-off between hybridized and monolithic IR detectors published in the late 1970s and mid-1980s (cf Hugues, Rockwell, SBRC...teams papers from SPIE Digital Library), a period during which the superiority of the hybrid approach was demonstrated and which is not ready to be denied

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    Replies
    1. Yes I remember that Eric Fossum has published InGaAs/InP based CCD device in the 1980s.

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