IMEC＇s Technology Makes Hyperspectral Imagers Small and Efficient

Published:2012/1/30 21:07:00 Author:Li xiao na From:SeekIC

Imec is a micro- and nanoelectronics research center. A micromachining has been used by Imec to show a hyperspectral camera. Every pixel of this sensor is a spectrometer. Different objects, which can not be discriminated by traditional RGB methods, can be distinguished by the hyperspectral camera. Applications of this technology include crop screening, food selection, skin cancer detection and target detection.

However, the available hyperspectral cameras can not be used for the time-critical or high-throughput applications for they are always large, expensive and slow. The use of high-throughput applications is also limited to highly specialised research environments. IMEC’s chip-based technology has solved the above problems, which cuts the cost and size of the hyperspectral imagers.

The camera is exhibited at the SPIE Photonics West conference. A set of MEMS spectral filters is inside, which directly post-processed at wafer level on top of a commercially available CMOSIS CMV4000 (4Mpixel 180fps) image sensor. It has 100 spectral bands between 560nm (green) and 1000nm (infra-red). Filter bandwidth (full width half max) ranges from 3nm at 560nm to 20nm at 1000nm, and the transmission efficiency of the filters is around 85%. Typical integration times in prototype are between 2 and 10ms under 450W halogen light illumination.

The solution has the scanning speeds which meet the real industrial requirements because of its integrated filter design and high spectral filter efficiency. Moreover, the current state-of-the-art hyperspectral sensors even can be exceeded by the scanning speed. A commercially-available sensor, n appropriate hyperspectral filter are needed to create custom hyperspectral cameras.

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