Integration of wide field-of-view imagery functions in a detector dewar cooler assembly

Today, both military and civilian applications require miniaturized optical systems in order to give an imagery function to vehicles with small payload capacity. After the development of megapixel focal plane arrays (FPA) with micro-sized pixels, this miniaturization will become feasible with the integration of optical functions in the detector area. In the field of cooled infrared imaging systems, the detector area is the Detector-Dewar-Cooler Assembly (DDCA). A dewar is a sealed environment where the detector is cooled on a cold plate. We show in this paper that wide field of view imagery functions can be simply added to the dewar. We investigate two ways of integration and make two demonstrators. The first one called FISBI consists in replacing the window by a fish-eye lens and in integrating a lens in the cold shield. This optical system has a field of view of 180°. The second one, called IR-Cam-on-Chip, consists in integrating the optics directly on the focal plane array. This optical system has a field of view of 120°. The additional mass of the optics is sufficiently small to be compatible with the cryogenic environment of the DDCA. The performance of these cameras will be discussed and several evolutions of these cameras will be introduced too.

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