Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Toshiba Developed Uncooled IR QVGA Sensor

Toshiba Review 2010 vol. 65, No 6 published the following paper:

Uncooled Infrared Radiation Image Sensor
HONDA Hiroto / FUNAKI Hideyuki
Toshiba has developed a quarter video graphics array (QVGA) (320 x 240 pixels) uncooled infrared radiation image sensor that achieves a noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD) of 0.25 K. As this sensor can detect a person in the dark from the image of the temperature distribution by sensing far-infrared radiation emitted by the skin, it is applicable to many areas including pedestrian detection sensors for automobiles, human detection sensors, security sensors, and so on.
In order to increase the resolution, or the number of pixels, we have utilized a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based process to reduce the pixel pitch from 32 µm to 22 µm, which realizes a QVGA image sensor of the same sensitivity and chip size, and decrease the read-out circuit noise to improve the NETD from 0.55 K to 0.25 K.


Update: The full paper in Japanese is here.

2 comments:

  1. This performance is very poor compared to the state of the art products. But maybe the price is low. Who can tell the price of such device ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. so poor quality .. 0.25K even though 22um rather than 17um

    ReplyDelete

All comments are moderated to avoid spam and personal attacks.