A thermal infrared imager of competitive sensitivity and very simple construction is presented. It is a pyroelectric device of 96 pixels, based on ferroelectric polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF). It uses a novel charge-dispensing multiplexer based on ordinary light emitting diodes to achieve a noise-equivalent temperature change (NETD) of 0.13 K at a 5 Hz frame rate (2.1 Hz BW). Design information, theory, and measured performance are presented. Achieving such a low total system cost requires the use of the very least expensive optical system, a moulded polyethylene Fresnel lens, whose advantages and limitations are discussed. Several possible improvements, aggregating approximately 30 dB in sensitivity are also discussed, leading to the interesting possibility of few-millikelvin NETD values with an uncooled pyroelectric device of extremely low cost.
This paper is a preliminary description of three technologies for use in scanning and printing. There aren't a lot of experimental data here, unfortunately, because the ideas are new. They came out of a current effort to build a pocket-sized, battery-operated, non-contact 3D input device. The concept of this pocket 3D scanner is to allow someone to take simultaneous range and intensity images of a 10-50 cm diameter area in half a second, store a hundred or so of them, then play them back into a PC IR pot for OCR, printing, archival storage, or further processing. Such areas include flat or crinkled paper, hands and faces, machined parts, textures, and many others. Besides their use in input devices, these technologies could greatly improve the performance of low-end printers, at very low cost. None of these techniques is yet at a high state of development. The first is a scanning technique that should allow increasing pixel rates by a factor of 10 or more without significant additional optical or mechanical complexity; the second is an extremely fast focus actuator that should reduce the field flatness and accuracy requirements of the scan lens and scanner assembly, by allowing fast focus correction even within a scan line; an the third is a 'mass customizing' wavefront aberration correction method for producing very high quality laser beams from low quality optics, without requiring any hand work.
The ISICL sensor is a recently described measurement device for sensing and mapping the temporal and spatial distribution of isolated submicron particles in semiconductor processing plasma chambers, fluid tanks, and other inaccessible or hostile places. It requires no modifications to the chamber, and senses the volume directly over the wafer, while the process is running. Its detection sensitivity is extremely high: even in a very bright plasma, it requires only 50 scattered photons to detect a particle at a false alarm rate of 10-5 Hz. Here we present theoretical and experimental results for the sensitivity and volumetric sampling rate of the sensor, as well as a method of using the measured pulse height histogram to obtain particle size information, and some practical tests of performance versus window quality and back wall material.
A new method is described for the real-time in-line control of critical dimensions for positive- tone chemically amplified resist systems. The technique relies on the generation of a diffraction grating in the resist film when a latent image appears during the post-exposure bake. A simple optical illumination/collection arrangement allows the diffracted signal to be measured during the post-exposure bake. This signal can be correlated to linewidths when measured by a non-destructive SEM. The result is a post-exposure bake time that can be used to correct for exposure-and-bake temperature variations to conveniently provide overall process control. Results generated by a prototype system are presented for a variety of 0.5- micrometers mask levels and process conditions.
In a high J-value scheme (photo-excitation sequence), the authors investigate the characteristics of three-step photo-ionization, through an autoionizing level, of a complex atom using three single-mode pulsed dye lasers. The report covers (1) ion yield dependence on the balance of three laser intensities; (2) AC Stark effect, observed in intermediate excitation; and (3) multi-photon-resonance effect in a stepwise near-resonant excitation. The experimental results are discussed through comparison with the theoretical analyses, that include the effects of magnetic sublevel degeneracy.
This paper describes a simple all-electronic noise cancellation scheme which allows wideband shot noise limited optical measurements at baseband with noisy lasers in many kinds of optical systems. With this system it is usually possible to achieve the performance of a complex heterodyne system with a much simpler homodyne approach. Although it is similar to earlier differential and ratiometric techniques its noise cancellation performance is much better and it is highly effective at modulation frequencies up to tens of megahertz. The basic idea is to subtract photocurrents directly under feedback control to cancel excess noise (i. e. noise above the shot noise level) and spurious modulation of the beam. A sample is split off from the beam at the laser and detected with a photodiode similar to the main detector at the system output. Most optical systems and detectors have very wide temporal bandwidths and excellent linearity thus at all frequencies of interest the sample photocurrent has exactly the same instantaneous fractional excess noise fluctuations as the laser beam itself with no differential gain or phase. If a fraction of the sample photocurrent is subtracted from the main detector output with feedback controlling the division ratio to keep the DC component of the result at zero the excess noise cancels identically. The actual noise cancellation bandwidth is very wide and does not depend on the feedback bandwidth only on that of
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