The development of sensitive large format imaging arrays for the infrared promises to provide revolutionary capabilities for space astronomy. For example, the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on SIRTF will use four 256× 256 arrays to provide background limited high spatial resolution images of the sky in the 3 to 8 μm spectral region. In order to reach the performance limits possible with this gene...

A CMOS SSPM coupled to a scintillation crystal uses an array of CMOS Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode (GPD) pixels to collect light and produce a signal proportional to the energy of the radiation. Each pixel acts as a binary photon detector, but the summed output is an analog representation of the total photon intensity. We have fabricated arrays of GPD pixels in a CMOS environment, which make...

Theoretical analysis and experimental studies show that the two-energy detection method not only allows one to detect organics on the background of metal, but also substantially increases (by 3-5 times) the detection ability of the system as a whole, especially if parameters of the S-PD pair are optimized, in particular, when ZnSe(Te) is used in the low-energy circuit. A possibility to distingu...

The ESO Infrared Detector High Speed Array Control and Processing Electronics, IRACE, is designed as a modular system which supports readout and data processing of arrays with four, and eventually more, output channels. In addition, the system can handle several separate arrays by routing the data to multiple processing chains. Detector front-end(s) are galvanically isolated from the data proce...