Imaging with charge-coupled devices

The noise characteristics (photon noise, bias charge noise, trapping noise, output circuit noise and dark current noise) of surface channel and buried channel CCD imagers are examined. A tradeoff study of MTF vs aliasing indicates that CCD arrays having noncontiguous pixels produce imagery superior to arrays having overlapping pixels except in cases where sub-resolution objects are to be detected. Direct view imagers with cooled buried channel interline CCD arrays with the distributed floating gate amplifier have produced imagery at 35 electrons per pixel per frame. It is shown that CCDs and CIDs will be useful for detection and signal processing in high performance infrared focal plane arrays.