Abstract
This paper presents a readout integrated circuit (ROIC) with inverter-based capacitive trans-impedance amplifier (CTIA) and pseudo-multiple sampling technique for infrared focal plane array (IRFPA). The proposed inverter-based CTIA with a coupling capacitor, executing auto-zeroing technique to cancel out the varied offset voltage from process variation, is used to substitute differential amplifier in conventional CTIA. The tunable detector bias is applied from a global external bias before exposure. This scheme not only retains stable detector bias voltage and signal injection efficiency, but also reduces the pixel area as well. Pseudo-multiple sampling technique is adopted to reduce the temporal noise of readout circuit. The noise reduction performance is comparable to the conventional multiple sampling operation without need of longer readout time proportional to the number of samples. A CMOS image sensor chip with 55x65 pixel array has been fabricated in 0.18um CMOS technology. It achieves a 12umx12um pixel size, a frame rate of 72 fps, a power-per-pixel of 0.66uW/pixel, and a readout temporal noise of 1.06mV rms (16 times of pseudo-multiple sampling), respectively. © 2013 Copyright SPIE.