Advances in low-persistence high-uniformity SWIR InGaAs FPA technology at Teledyne Technologies

Teledyne Judson Technologies (TJT), a subsidiary of Teledyne SciCam and Teledyne Imaging Sensors (TIS), have jointly developed a low persistence InGaAs focal plane array (FPA) for use in TIS’s MicroCam SWIR camera. This FPA is built on the Hawaii-1RG (H1RG) read-out integrated circuit (ROIC) which has 1024x1024 pixels with an 18 μm pixel pitch format. The newly developed InGaAs focal plane arrays exhibit a persistence of 0.01%, representing a significant improvement over the previously reported median value of 0.05%. This paper reports the InGaAs detector design and fabrication processes and FPA test results of low persistence focal plane arrays. Unique wafer and detector architecture were designed, developed and implemented to allow for low persistence, low dark current, low bad pixel fraction, high uniformity, and large reverse bias operation. Data at both the wafer and focal plane array (FPA) levels are presented and compared with previous work in terms persistence, dark current, quantum efficiency (QE), correlated double sampling (CDS) noise, bad pixel fraction and clustering. Significant and very positive improvements have been achieved in all evaluated key parameters.