Quantum efficiency of a back-illuminated CCD imager: an optical approach

Donald E. Groom; Steven E. Holland; Michael E. Levi; Nicholas P. Palaio; Saul Perlmutter; Richard J. Stover; Mingzhi Wei

doi:10.1117/12.347079

27 April 1999 Quantum efficiency of a back-illuminated CCD imager: an optical approach

Donald E. Groom, Steven E. Holland, Michael E. Levi, Nicholas P. Palaio, Saul Perlmutter, Richard J. Stover, Mingzhi Wei

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 3649, Sensors, Cameras, and Systems for Scientific/Industrial Applications; (1999) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.347079
Event: Electronic Imaging '99, 1999, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

We have developed an optical approach for modeling the quantum efficiency (QE) of back-illuminated CCD optical imagers for astronomy. Beyond its simplicity, it has the advantage of providing a complete fringing description for a real system. Standard thin-film calculations are extended by (a) considering the CCD itself as a thin film, and (b) treating the refractive index as complex. The QE is approximated as the fraction of the light neither transmitted nor reflected, which basically says that all absorbed photons produce e-h pairs and each photoproduced e or h is collected. Near-surface effects relevant to blue response must still be treated by standard semiconductor modeling methods. A simple analytic expression describes the QE of a CCD without antireflective (AR) coatings. With AR coatings the system is more easily described by transfer matrix methods. A two-layer AR coating is tuned to give a reasonable description of standard thinned CCDs, while the measured QE of prototype LBNL totally depleted thick CCDs is well described with no adjustable parameters. Application to the new LBNL CCDs indicates that these device swill have QE > 70 percent at (lambda) equals 1000 nm and negligible fringing in optical system faster than approximately f4.0.

Citation Download Citation

Donald E. Groom, Steven E. Holland, Michael E. Levi, Nicholas P. Palaio, Saul Perlmutter, Richard J. Stover, and Mingzhi Wei "Quantum efficiency of a back-illuminated CCD imager: an optical approach", Proc. SPIE 3649, Sensors, Cameras, and Systems for Scientific/Industrial Applications, (27 April 1999); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.347079

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