Damage effect on CMOS detector irradiated by single-pulse laser

Abstract

ABSTRCTImaging systems are widespread observation tools used to fulfill various functions such as recognition, detection and identification. These devices such as CMOS and CCD can be damaged by laser. It is very important to study the damage mechanism of CMOS and CCD. Previous studies focused on the interference and damage of CCD. There were only a few researches on the interaction of CMOS and the laser.In this paper, using a 60ns, 1064 nm single-pulse laser to radiate the front illuminated CMOS detector, the typical experiment phenomena were observed and the corresponding energy density thresholds were measured. According to the experiment phenomena, hard damage process of CMOS can be divided into 3 stages. Based on the structure and working principle of CMOS, studying the damage mechanism of 3 stages by theoretical analysis, point damage was caused by the increase in leakage current due to structural defects resulting from thermal effects, half black line damage and black lines cross damage were caused by signal interruption due to that the device circuit fuses were cut. Enhancing the laser energy density, the damaged area expanded. Even if the laser energy density reached 1.95 J/cm 2 , black lines has covered most of the detector pixels, the detector still not completely lapsed, the undamaged area can imaging due to that pixels of CMOS were separated with each other. Experiments on CMOS by laser pulses at the wavelength of 1064 nm and the pulse duration in 25ps was carried out, then the thresholds with different pulse durations were measured and compared. Experiments on CMOS by fs pulsed laser at the frequency of 1 Hz, 10 Hz and 1000 Hz were carried out, respectively, the results showed that a high-repetition-rate laser was easier to damage CMOS compared to single-shot laser.Keyword list: sensors, damage effect, single-pulse laser, the front illuminated CMOS INTRODUTIONCCD and CMOS camera systems are widely used for civilian purposes such as recognition, detection, tracking, identification and inspection. But all these CCD and CMOS, whatever their wavelength range of operation, are very sensitive to strong light [1][2][3][4][5] . Researches on the effect that the laser irradiates CCD and CMOS can help us to understand the anamorphic image when the CCD and CMOS cameras were irradiated by the laser or avoid such a disturbance. Now aiming at the CCD and CMOS camera systems, studies on the laser irradiating effect have already been reported in many literatures, in which the saturation, damage and blooming effects have been well analyzed [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] . In recent years, due to the raising of technics, the CMOS devices achieve CCD imaging quality while maintaining the inherent size, cost, and integration advantages of CMOS. As a result, CMOS has been applied in more and more fields. There were also some researches about the laser irradiation effect to CMOS. In previous studies, the interference threshold, the damage threshold and completely damage threshold of CMOS under vacuum and atmospheric conditi...

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