Study of the MTF of a MWIR T2SL focal plane array in IDDCA configuration

Type-II InAs/GaSb superlattice (T2SL) has recently matured into a commercially available technology addressing both MWIR and LWIR spectral domains. As the prerequisites such as Quantum Efficiency (QE) and dark current were met, more advanced figures of merits related to the ElectroOptic (EO) system as a whole can now be studied to position this technology. In this paper, we focus on modulation transfer function (MTF) measurements. Knowing the MTF of a detector is indeed of primary importance for the EO system designers, since spatial filtering affects the system range. We realized MTF measurements on a 320 × 256 MWIR T2SL FPA provided by IRnova, using a Continuously Self Imaging Grating (CSIG). The advantage of this experimental configuration is that no high performance projection optics is required thanks to the self-imaging property (known as Talbot effect) to project a pattern with known spatial frequencies on the photodetector. Besides, the pattern being propagation invariant, alignment is easier and the bench does not require exact knowledge of the focal plane distance to operate, opening measurement in Integrated Detector Dewar Cooler Assembly (IDDCA) configuration. Extracted from measurements, the pixel size is 26 µm for a pitch of 30 µm.