Development of noncryogenic cooled carbon nanotube-based infrared focal plane array with integrated readout circuitry

Abstract

Infrared (IR) detectors are enormously important for various applications including medical diagnosis, night vision etc. The current bottleneck of high-sensitive IR detectors is the requirement of cryogenic cooling to reduce the noise. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) exhibit low dark current which allows CNTs to work without cooling. This paper presents the development of noncryogenic cooled IR focal plane array (FPA) using CNTs. The FPA consists of an array of CNTbased IR detectors which are sensitive to IR signal at room temperature. The CNT-based detectors can be made by our nanomanufacturing process. and the sensitivity of the detectors at a special wavelength can be achieved by selecting and controlling the bandgap of CNTs during the process. Besides, a readout circuitry has been integrated with the FPA to retrieve signals from the detectors for high throughput applications. © 2011 SPIE.