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Binning
Bracket
Pulsing
CCD Grading
Cosmic
Rays
Dark Current
Deep
Depletion CCD
Detection
Modes
Dual Capacity
Mode
Dual Readout
Mode
Dynamic Range
Etaloning
in CCDs
eXcelon CCD-EMCCD
UV
Extension
Fiber Optics
Flat
Fielding
Full Well
Capacity
Gain
Image
Calibration
Imager
Architectures
Image Intensifiers
ITO
CCD
Kinetics Mode
Linearity
Matching
Resolution
MPP Mode
Noise
Sources
On-chip
Multiplication Gain
Open
Poly CCD
Optical Window
PVCAM
Quantum
Efficiency
Readout
vs Frame Rate
Reducing
Dark Current
Saturation/
Blooming
Signal
to Noise Calculator
Signal
to Noise Ratio
Spurious
Charge
XP Cooling
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Deep
Depletion CCD
NIR detection with regular CCDs can be quite challenging,
especially for low-light applications, for the following
reasons
- 1. The silicon materials that CCDs are made
becomes increasingly transparent in the NIR, which
reduces the QE.
- 2. Back-illuminated CCDs with high QE experience
etaloning in the NIR range. The solution is the
eXcelon CCD.
- 3. Spectra and images taken in NIR suffer from
thermal background noise in comparison to UV-VIS
spectral range.
Deep Depletion CCDs (High-Resistance
Silicon Substrate CCDs)
Deep depletion CCDs were
specially designed for NIR applications which use a
material called "epitaxial silicon,” comprised
of high-resistance silicon with a highly doped substrate.
Epitaxial silicon minimizes the distance in which the
charge generated by photons can diffuse without being
counted as a signal. Princeton Instruments offers thermo-electric
(TE) and liquid nitrogen (LN) cooled deep depletion
detectors. Because Back-illuminated Deep depletion CCDs
cannot be made with an MPP mode, they have a higher
dark current. As a result, the half hour rule of thumb
cannot be used. Instead, TE-cooled devices should be
chosen if the typical exposure time expected for the
application is below half a minute. An LN-cooled device
should be chosen as an alternative. Princeton Instruments
offers multiple spectroscopy and imaging detectors fabricated
in deep depletion technology. They are based on PIXIS
and SPEC-10 platforms and utilize 100*1340, 400*1340
, 256*1024 and 1024*1024 CCD formats. Current Back-illuminated
Deep depleted CCDs, such as the PIXIS /400BR, offers
up to 35% QE at 1000 nm, which is especially beneficial
for such critical applications like NIR Raman spectroscopy.
Advantages of Deep depletion CCDs:
- Ability to probe materials and biological tissues
at deeper depths
- Easy discrimination of NIR fluorescence from
the tissue auto-fluorescence
- Increased availability of economical NIR illumination
sources such as NIR lasers
- Development of a new class of stable, NIR fluorescent
probes
- Increased interest in research areas such as
Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC
- Astronomical imaging (especially solar research)
in NIR region
- Absolute highest QE in the NIR
- Tailored for etaloning elimination
- Special NIR optimized antireflective coating
- Specially treated back surface structure to
further break up etaloning
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