Performances of a Solid Streak Camera Based on Conventional CCD with Nanosecond Time Resolution

Imaging systems with high temporal resolution are needed to study rapid physical phenomena ranging from shock waves, including extracorporeal shock waves used for surgery, to diagnostics of laser fusion and fuel injection in internal combustion engines. However, conventional streak cameras use a vacuum tube making thus fragile, cumbersome and expensive. Here we report an CMOS streak camera project consists in reproducing completely this streak camera functionality with a single CMOS chip. By changing the mode of charge transfer of CMOS image sensor, fast photoelectric diagnostics of single point with linear CMOS and high-speed line scanning with array CMOS sensor can be achieved respectively. A fast photoelectric diagnostics system has been designed and fabricated to investigate the feasibility of this method. Finally, the dynamic operation of the sensors is exposed. Measurements show a sample time of 500 ps and a time resolution better than 2 ns.