A low-power, high-speed, programmable arbitrary windowing infrared focal plane readout circuit

Abstract

Infrared imaging technology has an increasingly wide range of needs in application scenarios such as tracking and detection of high-speed targets and readout of region of interest, and system applications often have requirements for small size and low power consumption. In order to increase the frame rate of the IR detector and solve the difficulty of high power consumption faced at high speed readout, this paper proposes a programmable arbitrary windowing IP module based on a standard digital IC design and achieves ultra-low power optimization of the column-level module of the readout circuit through time-sharing multiplexing techniques. The overall design is a mixture of analogue and digital circuits, with compromises to optimize the area, noise and gain of the circuit, resulting in the integration of analogue and digital circuit layouts. In this paper, a low noise, high speed programmable arbitrary windowing ROIC has been fabricated in the 0.18μm CMOS process, the pixel array is 640×512 and the pixel pitch is 15μm. It is coupled with a short-wave infrared InGaAs detector chip to form a FPA assembly and tested. The results show that the readout rate is greater than 15MHz, the column-level power consumption is only 15mW, the total power consumption is less than 100mW, and the windowing function can be specified in any area with a minimum windowing size of 8×8.