An Event-Driven High-Speed Imaging and Trace Detection ROIC for Cryogenic Infrared FPAs

This paper presents an event-driven readout integrated circuit (ROIC) for imaging and target-tracking infrared focal plane arrays (IRFPAs). The pixel circuit consists of event detection (ED) and imaging and trace detection (ITD). Based on the dynamic vision sensor (DVS) structure, ED encodes the temporal changes of infrared radiation into synchronized 1.5-bit events and transmits them to the off-chip postprocessor. When a moving target is recognized, the region of interest (ROI) window address will be feedback to ROIC and read out the image and trace information provided by ITD, which is based on infinite impulse response in the analog domain. These absolute intensities and multi-frame fused trace allow the post-processor to complete high-accuracy agile action recognition. This ROIC provides a spatiotemporal redundant compression and energy-efficient solution for fast-moving object detection and analysis. A prototype based on a 16×16 array of 20 µm pixel-pitch has been fabricated using a 0.18 µm 1P5M CMOS process, consuming 11.93mW@12.2kHz event and image frame frequency. Detailed test and measurement results of the prototype are presented.