Aug. 22, 2002 – Thousand Oaks, CA, and Taipei, Taiwan – Rockwell Scientific Co. LLC (RSC) and UMC have develoed the HAWAII-2RG, a readout IC (ROIC) designed by RSC and fabricated by UMC based on its mixed-mode CMOS process and precision stitching technique. The project was funded by the NASA Ames Research Center through a contract with the U. of Hawaii.

The 40mm x 40mm chip is being used with infrared detectors developed by RSC to produce astronomy focal plane arrays (FPAs) with a base resolution of 4.2 million pixels and mosaic resolution of 16.8 million pixels. Applications that will utilize the infrared imaging sensor include several ground-based telescopes; the arrays are also one of the candidates for NASA’s next generation space telescope.

RSC produces the FPA by bonding the HAWAII-2RG readout to a matching 2048 by 2048 infrared detector array fabricated in Mercury Cadmium Telluride.