Infrared readout electronics for space science sensors - Eric Fossum

DoD applications where one or two-point non-uniformity correction is performed in real-time, non-uniformity calibrationin scientific applications is often performed with many data points both on the ground and sometimes in flight. Thecalibration is applied to the sensor data on the ground to minimize on-board data processing requirements. Futuremissions may benefit from on-board non-uniformity calibration to enhance the compressibility of the data and to enableon-board feature extraction.4.4 Chopper-Stabilized Input Circuits (CSI)Chopper-stabilized unit cell circuits offer two significant improvements over conventional linear amplifiers: effects ofMOSFET threshold mismatch is vastly reduced and 1/f noise performance of the amplifier is improved. The chopperstabilized unit cell consists of a modulator that translates the input signal to higher frequency where the 1/f noise is low.Since the carrier amplifier is ac. coupled, d.c. offset components are removed. The output of the unit cell is thendownconverted in frequency by using synchronous demodulation. Amber Engineering has demonstrated operation of achopper-stabilized focal-plane readout in a 100 m pitch, dissipating