• Publications of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.43-49
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• 2006

The KASINICS (KASI Near Infrared Camera System) is a ground-based Near-Infrared (NIR) imaging instrument developed by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). In this paper, we report the test results of the KASINICS camera optics system which is comprised of a 1-1 Offner relay. We measure that the surface RMS fluctuations of the Offner mirrors are at the level of $10^{-1}-10^{-2}$ of the target wavelengths, showing that the mirrors are sufficiently smooth for NIR observations. The alignment of the Offner optics system has been checked too. Our ray-tracing simulations find that the image quality should not degrade more than the pixel size of the KASINICS ($40{\mu}m$), if a de-centering or a tilt of the Offner mirrors are within 5mm, or $2.5^{\circ}$. Our measurement shows that the de-centering or the tilt of the Offner mirrors are less than 1 mm or $0.5^{\circ}$, assuring that the KASINICS image quality are not affected by the alignment errors. We have also measured that the optics resolution is $20{\mu}m$ and it does not degrade more than 10% over the detector surface area of 14.3 mm ${/times}$ 14.3mm. Overall, we conclude that the KASINICS optics system satisfies the design requirements for NIR imaging observations.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.10
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• pp.80-86
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• 2014

A low-noise readout circuit is studied for 2-D capacitive microbolometer focal plane arrays (FPAs). In spite of the merits of the integration method, a simple and effective pixelwise readout circuit without integration is used for input circuit because of a small pixel size and narrow noise bandwidth. To reduce the power consumption and the kT/C noise, which is the dominant noise of the capacitive microbolometer FPAs with small capacitance, a new correlated double sampling (CDS) is used for columnwise circuit. The proposed circuit has been designed using a $0.35-{\mu}m$ 2-poly 4-metal CMOS process for a microbolometer array with a pixel size of $50{\mu}m{\times}50{\mu}m$. The proposed circuit effectively reduces the kT/C noise and the other low-frequency noise of microbolometer, and the noise characteristics of the fabricated chip have been verified by measurements. The rms noise voltage of the proposed circuit is reduced from 30 % to 55 % compared to that of the simple readout input circuit, and the noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD) of the proposed circuit is very low value of 21.5 mK.