A wafer scale visual-to-thermal converter

Wafer scale transducer arrays (WSTA's) containing multitransducer arrays combined with processing circuits are produced using a combination of CMOS technology, silicon micromachining, and laser interconnection techniques. A prototype wafer scale visual-to-thermal converter is being developed to convert a visual scene to thermal scene with the same resolution. The basic array is composed of transducer pixels, which combine photodetectors and thermal emitters as transducers together with signal conditioning and control circuitry, enabling 75%-50% local redundancy of system components. Unlike digital WSI designs, the WSTA redundancy approach is driven by regularity in transducer location and emphasizes local over global transducer sparing even when considering cluster defects. For WSTA, testing of functioning cells for WSI must be supplemented by compensating the transducer nonuniformities across the array.<>