Comparison of Long-Wave Infrared Quantum-Dots-in-a-Well and Quantum-Well Focal Plane Arrays

This paper reports on a comparison between a commercially available quantum-well infrared focal plane array (FPA) and a custom quantum-dot (QD)-in-a-well (DWELL) infrared FPA in the long-wave infrared (LWIR). The DWELL detectors consist of an active region composed of InAs QDs embedded in In0.15Ga0.85As quantum wells. DWELL samples were grown using molecular beam epitaxy and fabricated into 320 times 256 pixels FPA with a flip-chip indium bump technique. Both the DWELL and QmagiQ commercial quantum-well detector were hybridized to an Indigo ISC9705 readout circuit and tested in the same camera system. Calibrated blackbody measurements at a device temperature of 60 K with LWIR optics yield a noise equivalent change in temperature of 17 mK and 91 mK for quantum-well and DWELL FPAs operating at 0.95- and 0.58-V biases, respectively. The comparison of the DWELL and quantum-well FPA when imaging a 35degC black body showed that the DWELL had a signal-to-noise ratio of 124 while the quantum-well FPA showed 1961. As well, the quantum-well FPA showed a higher collection efficiency of 1.3 compared to the DWELL.