An uncooled infrared readout circuit with substrate temperature compensation

Abstract

A new read-out IC(ROIC) architecture with substrate temperature compensation was introduced for the uncooled microbolometer detector.The influence of responsivity on the substrate temperature was evaluated.Numerical simulation and measurement of the proposed ROIC architecture demonstrated high quality of signal over wide temperature range without using multiple corrections.A 320×240 uncooled microbolometer focal plane array(FPA) based on the proposed circuit was implemented on silicon using a 0.5 μm CMOS technology.The measurement data show that the maximum difference of the output voltages is only 2mV over the change of 20K in the substrate temperature.This architecture is expected to allow removal of the thermoelectric cooler(TEC) from uncooled systems.Thus it is ideally suited for low-cost,low-power,and low-weight production applications.