Publications

Over the past 20 years, we have developed arrays of custom-fabricated silicon and InP Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode arrays, CMOS readout circuits to digitally count or time stamp single-photon detection events, and techniques to integrate these two components to make back-illuminated solid-state image sensors for lidar, optical communications, and passive imaging...

Microfabrication techniques were developed to create flexible 24 um thick glucose sensors on polyimide substrates. Measurements of the sensor performance, recorded as voltage potential, were carried out for a range of glucose concentrations (0 – 8 mM) in physiological saline (0.1 M NaCl, pH 7.4). The sensors show rapid response...

Vector sensor imaging presents a challenging problem in covariance estimation when allowing arbitrarily polarized sources. We propose a Stokes parameter representation of the source covariance matrix which is both qualitatively and computationally convenient. Using this formulation, we adapt the proximal gradient and expectation maximization (EM) algorithms and apply them in...

The radio sky below ~10 MHz is largely unexplored due to the inability of ground-based telescopes to observe near or below the ionospheric plasma frequency, or cut-off frequency. A space-based interferometric array is required to probe the portion of the electromagnetic (E-M) spectrum below 10 MHz with sufficient angular resolution...

An uncooled thermal imager is being developed based on a liquid crystal (LC) transducer. Without any electrical connections, the LC transducer pixels change the long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) scene directly into a visible image as opposed to an electric signal in microbolometers. The objectives are to develop an imager technology scalable...

This article reviews MIT Lincoln Laboratory's work over the past 20 years to develop photon-sensitive image sensors based on arrays of silicon Geiger-mode avalanche photodiodes. Integration of these detectors to all-digital CMOS readout circuits enable exquisitely sensitive solid-state imagers for lidar, wavefront sensing, and passive imaging.

Geiger-mode avalanche photodiodes (GMAPDs) are capable of detecting single photons. They can be operated to directly trigger all-digital circuits, so that detection events are digitally counted or time stamped in each pixel. An imager based on an array of GMAPDs therefore has zero readout noise, enabling quantum-limited sensitivity for photon-starved...

An uncooled thermal imager is being developed based on a liquid crystal transducer. The liquid crystal transducer changes a long-wavelength infrared scene into a visible image as opposed to an electric signal in microbolometers. This approach has the potential for making a more flexible thermal sensor. One objective is to...

We report on two recently developed charge-coupled devices (CCDs) for adaptive optics wavefront sensing, both designed to provide exceptional sensitivity (low noise and high quantum efficiency) in high-frame-rate low-latency readout applications. The first imager, the CCID75, is a back-illuminated 16-port 160x160 pixel CCD that has been demonstrated to operate at...

We describe a new sensor that combines dynamic pupil coding with a digital readout integrated circuit (DROIC) capable of modulating a scene with a global or per-pixel time-varying, pseudo-random, and duo-binary signal (+1-1,0).