On-chip compensation of self-heating effects in microbolometer infrared detector arrays

Abstract

It is well known that the signal due to self-heating during read-out of uncooled microbolometers is much larger than that created by incident infrared (IR) radiation to be detected. This results in a degradation of the performance by requiring a large dynamic range of the preamplifier to be allocated for the signal due to self-heating. In this paper, we have studied self-heating during the read-out of microbolometer IR detectors and demonstrated a compensation technique using two microbolometers arranged in a Wheatstone bridge read-out circuit. Finally, the concept is extended for application in focal plane arrays (FPA) and a possible circuit configuration is given to achieve the compensation which may enhance the performance of uncooled detector arrays. © 1998 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.