The paper describes the design and performance of a solid-state area-array CCD sensor coupled to a fiber-optic slab. The sensor uses a fra,e transfer organization and has 512 lines of 512 photoelements, each of 18.5 μm x 23.5 μm dimensions, giving, a total active area of 9.472 mm x 12.032 mm. This area being entirely photo-sensitive (no memory zone), the device operates in a single-field mode. The on-chip amplifier allows a readout frequency (pixel frequency) of over 10 MHz. The sensor is coupled to a fiber-optic slab, of unity magnification, overlying the entire photosensitive surface. The elementary fiber diameter is 5.5 μm. A new method of coupling through a gluing process ensures an excellent dimensional stability and immunity to mechanical stresses (vibrations, accelerations ...). The assembly forms a single unit with a metallic centring disk, to facilitate mounting and positioning in equipment. The good performance of the combined sensor and fiber-optic faceplate : low noise (300 μV, wide dynamic range (6500:1) and high illumination response (12 V/μJ/cm2 at λ 550 nm) opens many applications, for example - low-light-level imaging by coupling with an LII tube : nighttime surveillance, astronomy ...) - oscilloscope trace sensing, transient and high-speed phenomena analysis - laser imaging - medical imaging. Furthermore, the 512 x 512 pixel image format is particularly well suited to digital image acquisition and processing. This product was developed as part of a research project for the French Coumissariat A l'Energie Atomique.

Date Published: 11 December 1985
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 0570, Solid-State Imaging Arrays, (11 December 1985); doi: 10.1117/12.950299

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0570:
Solid-State Imaging Arrays
Eustace L. Dereniak; Keith N. Prettyjohns, Editor(s)