Impact of CMOS Pixel and Electronic Circuitry in the Performance of a Hartmann-Shack Wavefront Sensor

Abstract

This work presents a numerical simulation of a Hartmann-Shack wavefront sensor (WFS) that assesses the impact of integrated electronic circuitry on the sensor performance, by evaluating a full detection chain encompassing wavefront sampling, photodetection, electronic circuitry and wavefront reconstruction. This platform links dedicated C algorithms for WFS to a SPICE circuit simulator for integrated electronics. The complete codes can be easily replaced in order to represent different detection or reconstruction methods, while the circuit simulator employs reliable models of either off-the-shelf circuit components or custom integrated circuit modules. The most relevant role of this platform is to enable the evaluation of the applicability and constraints of the focal plane of a given wavefront sensor prior to the actual fabrication of the detector chip. In this paper, we will present the simulation results for a Hartmann-Shack wavefront sensor with an orthogonal array of quad-cells (QC) integrated along with active-pixel (active-pixel sensor (APS)) circuitry and analog-to-digital converters (ADC) on a “complementary metal oxide semiconductor” (CMOS) process and deploying a modal wavefront reconstructor. This extended simulation capability for wavefront sensors enables the test and verification of different photosensitive and circuitry topologies for position-sensitive detectors combined with the simulation of sampling microlenses and reconstruction algorithms, with the goal of enhancing the accuracy in the prediction of the wavefront-sensor performance before a detector CMOS chip is actually fabricated.

Peripheral Wavefront Sensor with Fixation Target Made by Optical Simulation for Measuring Human Eye Regardless of Spectacle

“…The WFS measures aberrations by assessing the difference between the measured focal points and ideal focal points. The detailed principles of using the WFS have been explained in previous studies [26][27][28][29][30]. An aberrometer can measure human eye aberrations in the form of Zernike coefficients.…”

Laser Sensors for Displacement, Distance and Position

“…The papers can be classified based on sensors’ measurement principles: Triangulation sensor [1,2,3,4], time-of-flight sensor [5,6,7], confocal sensor [8], interferometric sensor [9], fiber Bragg grating sensor [10], and laser Doppler velocimetry [11]. There are also three papers [12,13,14], which are not classified in the above categories.…”

“…In [13], a numerical simulation platform is proposed for a Hartmann–Shack wavefront sensor. The simulation platform contains every step in the wavefront detection and reconstruction process, from the generation of the input wavefronts to the computation of the reconstructed wavefronts and their respective resulting errors.…”

A high performance integrated readout circuit for wavefront sensors

“…Although developed to different degrees of completeness and universality, they do not yet offer the possibility to couple electronic-circuit simulations, on circuit and device level, along with optical and data-processing algorithms. In this work, we evaluate the impact of a promising integrated-circuit pixel topology at the focal-plane array of a HS WFS by means of a computational platform we developed for the seamless simulation of the optical and electronic signal flow, whose details are presented in previous works [13,14].…”