A high-performance Test-Bed Dedicated for Responsivity Measurements of Infrared Photodetectors in a Wide Band of Low Temperatures

Abstract

Nowadays, the detection in the infrared band (IR) has shown great importance in several areas such as skin illnesses detection, remote sensor and in different military devices. The responsible for such detection is, basically, photodetector arrays (FPA) sensitive to infrared radiation. This paper presents a modular and adaptative test-bed, based upon an arrangement of 24 electro and optical components divided in four major functional blocks, providing methodological procedures that allows an accurate design verification of infra-red photodetectors. The target metric that the system is con- ceived to provide is Responsivity. In essence, the developed system differs from the previous ones by its adaptability and its hardware modularity conception that allows an easy reconfiguration to test different kinds of photodetectors. Here we compare a theoretical calculation of responsivity with actual experimental measurements, allowing low temperature meas- urements between 16K and 100K, in wavelength from 0.7μm up to 12μm (0.8μm to 1.0μm in this work) and the possibility to set detectors with up to 10 I/O electric terminals. The operational validation of this test-bed is achieved with a studied Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors (QWIP), exhibiting high compliance with the expected theoretical results.