An EMCCD Imaging Sensor Capturing Images from Sunlight to Starlight

A 1024×1024 EMCCD imaging sensor that captures images from sunlight to starlight was designed and fabricated. The pixel size was 10 μm×10 μm. The device includes nondestructive floating gate output amplifier, its charge-to-voltage conversion factor is 3.57 μV/e^-, and its charge handling capacity is 55.04 ke^-. The nondestructive floating gate output amplifier can sense the amount of charge present in a charge packet without altering the number of electrons in that charge packet. This enables the camera system to determine whether the pixel charge packet is routed through the normal gain output or the EMCCD output based on a user-selectable threshold. The intra-scene switchable gain feature enables wide-scale dynamic imaging. A vertical overflow drain structure suppressed the image blooming by 200^×. This feature enables imaging under extremely low light, even when bright objects are within a dark scene, thus allowing a single camera to capture quality images from sunlight to starlight.