Current mode read-out circuit for InGaAs photodiode applications

Infrared focal plane arrays have many military, industrial, medical, and scientific applications that require high-resolution and high-performance read-out electronics. In applications involving InGaAs sensor arrays, data read-out can be carried out by circuits implemented with 0.35μm CMOS technology. In this paper we propose a dynamically regulated cascode current mirror for pixel read-out. From simulation results, we expect this circuit to achieve a better trade-off between silicon area, signal-to-noise ratio, and output dynamic range than the trade-off that is currently achieved by current mode CMOS read-out circuits.