Development of astronomy large focal plane array "ALFA" at Sofradir and CEA

Fièque, B.; Lamoure, Adrien; Salvetti, F.; Aufranc, Sébastien; Gravrand, O.; Badano, G.; Boulade, O.; Mouzali, Salima; Basa, S.

doi:10.1117/12.2311713

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…The camera CAGIRE is equipped with an Astronomical Large Format Array (ALFA) detector of 2048 by 2048 square pixels of 15 µm on a side, manufactured by the French company LYNRED, and based on the MCT (Mercury Cadmium Telluride) technology developed at CEA-LETI. 5 The detector covers a spectral range from 0.8 µm to 2.1 µm, 6 justifying the need for a blocking filter for wavelengths longer than 1.8 µm on CAGIRE. The detection layer in HgCdTe (MCT) is hybridized with indium bumps on a Read Out Integration Circuit (ROIC), designed and manufactured by LYNRED.…”

Section: The Alfa Sensormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More information about the detector is given in Fieque et al 2018. 5 In order not to saturate the detector with the sky background, and to let enough dynamic available for bright objects, the exposures have to be shorter than 200 s in the J band and shorter than 30-60 s in the H band. This leads to accumulate around 30,000 electrons from the sky background (∼ 1 4 of the potential well capacity), with Poisson statistical fluctuations of approximately 170 electrons rms per pixels.…”

Section: The Alfa Sensormentioning

confidence: 99%

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Flux reconstruction for the NIR camera CAGIRE at the focus of the Colibrí telescope

Flèche

Atteia

Valentin

et al. 2022

X-Ray, Optical, and Infrared Detectors for Astronomy X

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CAGIRE is the near infrared camera of the Colibrí robotic telescope, designed for the follow-up of SVOM alerts, mainly Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs), and the quick imaging of sky regions where transient sources are detected by the SVOM satellite. CAGIRE is based on the Astronomical Large Format Array (ALFA) 2k x 2k SWIR sensor from the French consortium CEA-LYNRED. In the context of CAGIRE the sensor is operated in "Up the Ramp" mode to observe the sky in a square field of view of 21.7 arcmin on a side, in the range of wavelengths from 1.1 to 1.8 µm. An observation with CAGIRE consists of a series of short (1-2 minutes) exposures during which the pixels are read out every 1.3 second, continuously accumulating charges proportionally to the received flux, building a ramp.The main challenge is to quickly process and analyse these ramps, in order to identify and study the near infrared counterparts of the bursts, within 5 minutes of the reception of an alert. Our preprocessing, which is under development, aims at providing reliable flux maps for the astronomy pipeline. It is based on a sequence of operations. First, calibration maps are used to identify saturated pixels, and for each pixel, the usable (non saturated) range of the ramp. Then, the ramps are corrected for the electronic common mode noise, and differential ramps are constructed. Finally, the flux is calculated from the differential ramps, using a previously calibrated map of pixel non-linearities. We present here the sequence of operations performed by the preprocessing, which are based on previous calibrations of the sensor response. These operations lead to the production of a flux map corrected from cosmic-rays hits, a map depicting the quality of the fit, a map of saturated pixels and a map of pixels hit by cosmic-rays, before the acquisition of the next ramp. These maps will be used by the astronomy pipeline to quickly extract the scientific results of the observations, like the identification of uncatalogued or quickly variable sources that could be GRB afterglows.

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Section: The Alfa Sensormentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Alfa Sensormentioning

confidence: 99%

Flux reconstruction for the NIR camera CAGIRE at the focus of the Colibrí telescope

Flèche

Atteia

Valentin

et al. 2022

X-Ray, Optical, and Infrared Detectors for Astronomy X

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“…The program is at present in phase three led by Sofradir (FR) [4] and has the goal to design, manufacture and characterize a large format 2D array MCT array (shown in Figure 6) with the following parameters: The detailed design review has been completed successfully and the ROIC is under manufacture with the foundry. It is expected to be delivered in July this year with first ROIC level results available in the autumn.…”

Section: The Alfa Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detector development activities supported by the European Space Agency

Weber

Nelms

Minoglou

et al. 2019

International Conference on Space Optics — ICSO 2018

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Detectors play a crucial role for the instrument design and the achievable instrument performance. The wavebands of interest for remote sensing are the visible and the infrared. Therefore, the European Space Agency has a strong interest in the performance enhancement of detector arrays in those spectral ranges. The Agency follows a continuous development strategy to enhance the capabilities for future Earth observation and astronomy missions. This paper presents the technical and planning status of these detector technology development activities.

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“…In order to achieve these dimensions, the stitching technique has been implemented in the foundry and the ROIC is able to drive the pixels data through a maximum of 32 outputs channels with a readout speed up to 6 MHz, with the options to also readout at 100 kHz with 1 and 4 outputs. Table I summarizes the main ALFA detector performance measured at the CEA-IRFU [5] facilities [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integration of a Testbench for the Optical and Thermal Characterization of Near-Infrared Detectors Used in Ground and Space-Based Astronomy

Jiménez

Grau

Padilla

2021

IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas.

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The mercury-cadmium-tellurium (MCT) sensors are considered the ideal infrared detectors to equip the focal plane arrays (FPAs) of astronomical scientific missions and nowadays, Europe is not self-sufficient on this technology. To tackle this problem, the Astronomy European Infrared Detector (ASTEROID) project aims to provide Europe with the capability to manufacture high performance infrared focal plane arrays devoted to scientific use, space astronomy and ground-based telescope infrastructures. The resulting detector will be a hybridized MCT array with a CdZnTe substrate of 2k x 2k pixels and 15 µm of pixel pitch. The Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE) will lead the task to validate the detector performance with respect to the hybridization reliability between the readout integrated circuit (ROIC) and the MCT detector by submitting it to several low temperature thermal cycles. After every thermal stress, the detector will be optically characterized in order to measure any performance degradation and possible problems with the pixel operability. To perform such tasks, two custom setups, focused on optical and cryo-vacuum aspects were developed, which used in conjunction, allow to cool down the detector from the room temperature up to ∼30K while it is electro-optically characterized in terms of linearity, gain, quantum efficiency and cosmetics defects, among others. The whole cryo-vacuum system and the optical setup is fully described in this paper as part of the work packages assigned to IFAE to test the hybridized detector to assess the reliability at operating temperature and after several thermal cycles.

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Development of astronomy large focal plane array "ALFA" at Sofradir and CEA

Cited by 8 publications

References 2 publications

Flux reconstruction for the NIR camera CAGIRE at the focus of the Colibrí telescope

Flux reconstruction for the NIR camera CAGIRE at the focus of the Colibrí telescope

Detector development activities supported by the European Space Agency

Integration of a Testbench for the Optical and Thermal Characterization of Near-Infrared Detectors Used in Ground and Space-Based Astronomy

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