A study of high-speed gaAs CCDs and their potential applicaton as an imager
Date
1999
Authors
Hu, Shengli
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Abstract
The research work in this thesis is divided into two parts. The first part is on the modeling and testing of GaAs RGCCDs (resistive-gate charge-coupled devices), which is a part of a research collaboration between TRIUMF and the University of Victoria. The second part is a project on the design of a prototype GaAs RGCCD compression circuit for use in imagery.
The research on GaAs RGCCDs in this thesis primarily focuses on the modeling of the charge transfer properties of the device, the testing of the electrical and optical properties of the device, as well as noise and non-linearity analysis of the output circuit of the CCD. On the modeling side, an equivalent circuit model for GaAs RGCCD [21] was developed and it allowed us to study the transient effects of the pixel size using SPICE type simulator. On the testing side, the electrical and optical properties were measured and a model was proposed to explain the measurement results. Three output circuits for the CCD were compared. Methods to reduce the non-linearity were studied.
The second part of the research is on the design of a prototype compression circuit for a CCD imager. CCDs were used to capture the image data as well as for data storage in the form of an analog memory. This circuit uses the conditional replenishment method to reduce the data captured by the CCD imager. The potential applications of this circuit are in high speed imaging, such as high frame-rate image sensing and high-resolution image sensing.