Resistance Non-Uniformity Correction Method Using Bias Heating For Resistance Type Uncooled Microbolometer Fpas

This paper proposes a new resistance non-uniformity correction method for microbolometer-type uncooled thermal detector focal plane arrays (FPAs) that suffer from pixel-to-pixel resistance variation, which is conventionally corrected by applying a specific bias voltage to each detector by the use on-chip DACs. The proposed method uses the heating of the detector with electrical bias, where the detector is heated-up for a pre-determined period of time before the read-out phase. The proposed method uses only a heat-up signal source and simple digital blocks for each column, eliminating the need for DACs that occupy large area, contribute to the noise floor of the system, and dissipate extra power. The proposed method provides a detector current resolution of 14.5 nA with 9-bit digital data, which corresponds to the resolution of 12-bit DAC used in conventional methods.