Radial FPA based electro-optic imager

摘要

A radial based approach to electro-optic imagers, rather than the conventional rectilinear approach, would have basic overall system design advantages. Those system design advantages would apply to the components and the entire system implementation and include approaches to objective optical design, focal plane array FPA with fill factor, FPA layout and associated read-out integrated circuit ROIC, support electronics architecture and associated memory requirements, image processing IP algorithms, display layout and format, and eyepiece optics. A radial based approach to EO imagers would yield a device/system with attributes requiring less complicated optical components, with potentially fewer elements, for both the objective and eyepiece lenses. In addition, alternative objective optics could be more easily employed, such as holographic or wave front coded, due to reduced complexity of implementing correction algorithms as a result of referencing the system around its optical axis. The radial readout EO system would have pixel ‘one’ at the center and be ‘read out and displayed’ like the rings of a tree rather than words on a page.

主权项

1. A radial focal plane array (FPA) having rings of pixels around a center pixel based on radial addressing the radial focal plane array comprising:
a center pixel of the radial FPA having an assigned initial pair of address values to designate the center pixel of the radial FPA, wherein one of the address pair is a row address and another of the address pair is a ring address; rings of pixels, wherein each ring of pixels successively ringing around said center pixel is assigned a unique ring value using said ring address of the address pair, and wherein each pixel of each ring of pixels is assigned a row value using the row address of the address pair; row and ring access lines for reading out signals from the pixels using said address pairs; and a read-out integrated circuit connected to said row and ring access lines to read-out said signals from said pixels to generate radial read-out signals, wherein said radial focal plane array is better matched to a circular optical design of circular optics to achieve radial focal plane array read-outs while not discarding performance.