Toward low-cost infrared imagers: How to leverage Si IC ecosystem

Although performance remains paramount, especially in defense and security applications, cost increasingly drives the implementation strategy for existing and emerging infrared imaging systems. In this paper, we review two technologies that leverage mainstream Si IC technology and infrastructure to increase manufacturability and throughput and decrease the cost of infrared focal plane arrays. In the first example, we review a wafer-level vacuum packaging approach which replaces die-at-a-time serial approaches with a parallel process in which vacuum enclosures for hundreds of microbolometer arrays are formed simultaneously. The second example is a novel nanostructured short-wave infrared sensor developed at RTI International that can be monolithically integrated with Si CMOS at wafer scale.