Improved Platinum Silicide IRCCD Focal Plane

We describe the performance of two types of monolithic silicon IRCCD focal planes with platinum-silicide Schottky-barrier detectors. They are a 256 element line array and a 25X50 element area array. Both focal planes are entirely monolithic with Schottky photodiodes, buried channel CCD shift registers and output amplifiers all processed as a standard IC chip. These devices are sensitive in the 1.2 to 4.9 μm range but they are normally optically filtered to the 3.4 to 4.2 μm range. Their operating temperature is 77°K. A typical value of quantum-Lfficiency coefficient (C1) of the platinum-silicide photodiode was 5 to 77/eV for a 600 .R Pt deposition; however, recently focal planes have been fabricated with thin Pt deposition and C1 values have increased to > 257/eV. This increased quantum yield has resulted in devices with a noise equivalent irradiance (NEIL) of better than 0.1 µw/cm2.