Design of a low noise and high accuracy readout integrated circuit for infrared detectors

In this paper, a low noise and high accuracy readout integrated circuit (ROIC) for Infrared detectors is presented. The circuit is made up of capacitor trans-impedance amplifier (CTIA) and correlation double sampling (CDS) circuit. First, the accuracy, and injection efficiency of the CTIA structure which is used to convert the photo-current into voltage are fully discussed. The readout accuracy of weak current signal can be obviously improved by the using of CTIA. Then, the CDS structure with offset calibration technique is used to reduce the fixed pattern noise (FPN) of CTIA. Thus, the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the designed readout circuit is improved. By utilizing the above two techniques, the influence of noise on this circuit was greatly reduced and the precision of the ROIC was improved. Besides, the design of amplifier in CTIA is discussed in more detail, which will bring about important effect on performance of the whole circuit. Simulation results at Cadence Spectre demonstrated that the readout circuit had reached the requirement of application. The final chip was fabricated with Chartered 0.35um standard CMOS process. Testing results show that the linearity of CTIA is 99%, and that the readout accuracy is 10-bit, while the detecting current varies from 10pA to 10nA. Furthermore, the infrared image is shown in this paper, which means that the ROIC has a good performance at the practical application.

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