The lowest cost and smallest footprint VGA SWIR detector with high performance

Abstract

SOFRADIR is the worldwide leader on the cooled IR detector market for high-performance space, military and security applications thanks to a well mastered Mercury Cadmium Telluride (MCT) technology, and recently thanks to the acquisition of III-V technologies including Indium Gallium Arsenide (InGaAs). As a result, strong and continuous development efforts are deployed to deliver cutting edge products with improved performances in terms of spatial and thermal resolution, dark current, quantum efficiency, low excess noise and operability. Recent years have evidenced significant progress with InGaAs process maturity enabling low noise detectors operable at room temperature, with no cooling requirement. This new generation of so called Tecless devices meets a surging interest for affordable Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) detectors for use in volume applications such as industrial machine vision, science imaging or surveillance applications. For these systems, the latest uncooled InGaAs sensors allow major cost savings without sacrificing performance. In this talk we will review and analyze the impact of temperature on InGaAs detectors. We will also discuss implementation and optimization tradeoffs which should be considered when using uncooled InGaAs SWIR detectors.