ABSTRACT
We report a type-II superlattice mid-wave infrared 320×256 imager at 81 K with the M-barrier design that achieved background limited performance (BLIP) and â¼99% operability. The 280 K blackbody's photon irradiance was limited by an aperture and a band-pass filter from 3.6 µm to 3.8 µm resulting in a total flux of â¼5×10(12) ph.cm(-2).s(-1). Under these low-light conditions, and consequently the use of a 13.5 ms integration time, the imager was observed to be BLIP thanks to a â¼5 pA dark current from the 27 µm wide pixels. The total noise was dominated by the photon flux and read-out circuit which gave the imager a noise equivalent input of â¼5×10(10) ph.cm(-2).s(-1) and temperature sensitivity of 9 mK with F/2.3 optics. Excellent imagery obtained using a 1-point correction alludes to the array's uniform responsivity.
