Compact infrared cryogenic wafer-level camera: design and experimental validation

Florence de La Barrière (1) , Guillaume Druart (1) , Nicolas Guérineau (1) , Gilles Lasfargues (2) , Manuel Fendler (2) , Nicolas Lhermet (2) , Jean Albert Taboury (3)

1 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Châtillon]
2 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information
3 Laboratoire Charles Fabry / Scop

We present a compact infrared cryogenic multichannel camera with a wide field of view equal to 120 degrees. By merging the optics with the detector, the concept is compatible with both cryogenic constraints and wafer-level fabrication. The design strategy of such a camera is described, as well as its fabrication and integration process. Its characterization has been carried out in terms of the modulation transfer function and the noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD). The optical system is limited by the diffraction. By cooling the optics, we achieve a very low NETD equal to 15 mK compared with traditional infrared cameras. A postprocessing algorithm that aims at reconstructing a well-sampled image from the set of undersampled raw subimages produced by the camera is proposed and validated on experimental images. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America

Domains: Physics [physics]; Physics [physics]; Optics [physics.optics]

Florence de La Barrière, Guillaume Druart, Nicolas Guérineau, Gilles Lasfargues, Manuel Fendler, et al.. Compact infrared cryogenic wafer-level camera: design and experimental validation. Applied optics, 2012, 51 (8), pp.1049--1060. ⟨hal-00701492⟩