Digital readout integrated circuit (DROIC) implementing time delay and integration (TDI) for scanning type infrared focal plane arrays (IRFPAs)

This paper presents a digital readout integrated circuit (DROIC) implementing time delay and integration (TDI) for scanning type infrared focal plane arrays (IRFPAs) with a charge handling capacity of 44.8 Me− while achieving quantization noise of 198 e− and power consumption of 14.35 mW. Conventional pulse frequency modulation (PFM) method is supported by a single slope ramp ADC technique to have a very low quantization noise together with a low power consumption. The proposed digital TDI ROIC converts the photocurrent into digital domain in two phases; in the first phase, most significant bits (MSBs) are generated by the conventional PFM technique in the charge domain, while in the second phase least significant bits (LSBs) are generated by a single slope ramp ADC in the time domain. A 90 × 8 prototype has been fabricated and verified, showing a significantly improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 51 dB for low illumination levels (280,000 collected electrons), which is attributed to the TDI implementation method and very low quantization noise due to the single slope ADC implemented for LSBs. Proposed digital TDI ROIC proves the benefit of digital readouts for scanning arrays enabling smaller pixel pitches, better SNR for the low illumination levels and lower power consumption compared to analog TDI readouts for scanning arrays.