Featured Articles
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Imaging Venus With A Scientific SWIR Camera
5/7/2021
German researcher Dr. Sebastian Voltmer has been looking at the inner planet Venus as a ring next to the sun and how the crescent is getting bigger. According to Dr. Voltmer, the cooled Ninox 640 II SWIR camera provided a much improved signal-to-noise ratio.
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Understanding High Performance SWIR Imaging Cameras
7/28/2020
The use of imaging systems to capture long wavelength photons continues to increase in diverse application areas. This white paper discusses the performance of InGaAs detector arrays with sensitivities in the VIS-SWIR region.
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Driver Vision Enhancement (DVE) With SWIR Cameras
7/22/2020
There are many current DVE systems that use passive thermal imaging systems to enhance a driver’s viewing capabilities while operating in darkness, fog, smoke, dust, etc. SWIR has emerged as a leading technology that meets the needs of DVE.
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Drone-Based Daylight EL Imaging Of PV Modules Using SWIR Cameras
6/30/2020
Electroluminescence (EL) imaging of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels provides high accuracy in detecting defects and faults. Further, the EL technique is used extensively due to a high level of detail and direct relationship to injected carrier density.
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Chemiluminescence Imaging Of Plants Using A Deep-Cooled CCD
6/9/2020
Chemiluminescence imaging combines the sensitive detection of chemiluminescence with the ability to locate and quantify the light emission. It requires high sensitivity combined with long exposure times to detect the few photons emitted by the chemical reaction of interest with the living organisms.
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Silicon Wafer Inspection With SWIR Cameras
6/9/2020
Silicon inspection can be challenging for silicon and semiconductor manufacturers in terms of pattern alignment, pattern defect inspection, and edge position bonding inspection. Foreign particles and defects may affect the wafers. This article discusses the use of silicon wafer inspection with SWIR cameras.
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Technical Note: Auto Gain Control And Non Uniformity Correction
6/9/2020
In SWIR cameras, the InGaAs FPA sensor can be difficult to manufacture so that all pixels are fully functional. As a solution, Raptor Photonics cameras use Non-Uniformity Corrections (NUC), or gain and dark current corrections, in order to obtain the same quality as a single A/D device. In addition, Raptor’s family of SWIR cameras is also capable of continuously performing Auto Gain Control (AGC) on the onboard FPGA. This application note goes into detail about the NUC and AGC features included in Raptor’s new SWIR cameras.
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Understanding Electron Multiplying Gain
5/28/2020
Electron multiplying CCD (EMCCD) cameras can detect very weak signals that would otherwise be lost within the noise floor of the camera. While a conventional CCD requires both long exposure times and slow readout rates, EMCCD cameras use much shorter exposure times and higher readout rates.
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History And Development Of EMCCD Technology – What Is Gen III?
5/28/2020
The earliest versions of EMCCD (Electron Multiplying CCD) sensors offered a new dimension in imaging that eliminated read noise from an image sensor. This application note provides a comparison between the first, second, and third generations of EMCCD technology.
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PentaVac™ Vacuum Technology: Scientific CCD Applications
5/28/2020
CCD imaging sensors are used extensively in high-end imaging applications, enabling acquisition of quantitative images with both high (spatial) resolution and high sensitivity. There are some photon-starved applications which require even these highly sensitive devices to be used with both long integration (exposure) times and high amounts of binning (on-chip charge summation) in order to obtain a detectable signal. For these type of applications the CCD sensor must be deep cooled in order to reduce the noise component associated with dark signal. PentaVac™ Technology from Raptor Photonics is available for a range of sensor types and formats, with a range of TECs and cooling methods which can be tailored for specific application requirements.