Miniaturized 320x256 indium gallium arsenide SWIR camera for robotic and unmanned aerial vehicle applications

We describe a new InGaAs SWIR microcamera developed for robotic and UAV applications. The camera has a volume less than 27 cm3, weighs less than 100 g, and consumes less than 1.4 W. The camera operates with the focal plane array at room temperature and is sensitive to the 0.9 μm to 1.7 μm SWIR band with a detectivity, D*, greater than (formula available in paper). The InGaAs focal plane array has 320x256 pixels on a 25 μm pitch. It features snapshot-mode integration with a minimum exposure time of 500 ns making it ideally suited for all-solid-state range-gated imaging. The full-frame readout rate is greater than 400 frames per second. The built-in windowing feature is highly flexible with as many as 8 arbitrarily shaped regions-of-interest can be located anywhere (including overlapping) on the imager. Eight 64 x 64 regions of interest (ROIs), for example, can be read out faster than 1000 frames per second with a single 64 x 64 ROI read out faster than 5000 frames per second enabling high speed target acquisition and tracking applications.