Next generation microbolometers for high resolution remote sensing

We describe our recent work on improving the time constant and NETD of uncooled microbolometer detector. Such improvement would enable infrared remote sensing with a spatial resolution better than 150 m from low earth orbits. Radiometric simulation of the new microbolometer designs shows that reduction of time constant by a factor of 3 and reduction of NETD by a factor of 1.5 can be achieved. Linear arrays of 512/spl times/3 microbolometers embedding the new designs have been fabricated for experimental validation.