ALPHACORE INC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase II: 24h

Description

Alphacore intends to submit a proposal for a Sequential Phase IIA grant in January 2018. Thus far in Phase II Alphacore has developed an initial prototype of a radiation-hardened 10,000-pixel camera with custom- designed 10,000-frames-per-second (10kpfs) capable image sensor IC, camera control PCB with FPGA and interface to a PC, and an enclosure allowing different lens options. Most of Alphacore's engineering hours have focused on the design of an optimized, 1-megapixel, 10kfps, radiation-hardened CMOS image sensor. This image sensor, in addition to being radiation hard, is the fastest megapixel-class image sensor with continuous video output ever built, to the best of our knowledge. Thus, it has tremendous potential value for scientific, medical, military and entertainment industries. One of the parameters that speaks to the complexity of this chip is the fact that it has four thousand 12-bit, 3MSPS ADCs. These relatively high-speed SAR ADCs have very specific pitch-matched layouts, i.e. they are 10um wide and 3mm long. Alphacore’s sensor has ultra-sensitive, radiation-hardened pinned photodiode pixels. At this point, the SPICE model for the full chip architecture is functional and transistor-level designs have been completed for all the circuit blocks. First version of the physical layout design has been completed for the full image sensor. The extracted netlist from the layout is not fully functional for the first layout version as of today and we are debugging it. We believe that the tapeout of this full-reticle-sized (22mm x 27mm) image sensor will take place in January 2018 and this means that it can be tested in April - May 2018.