Nonuniformity-Immune Read-In Integrated Circuit for Infrared Sensor Testing Systems

Abstract

In this study, a novel IR projector driver that can minimize nonuniformity in electric circuits, using a dual-current-programming structure, is proposed to generate high-quality infrared (IR) scenes for accurate sensor evaluation. Unlike the conventional current-mode structure, the proposed system reduces pixel-to-pixel nonuniformity by assigning two roles (data sampling and current driving) to a single transistor. A prototype of the proposed circuit was designed and fabricated using the SK-Hynix 0.18 µm CMOS process, and its performance was analyzed using post-layout simulation data. It was verified that nonuniformity, which is defined as the standard deviation divided by the mean radiance, could be reduced from 21% to less than 0.1%.