Initially named OCAMIR (from its big sister OCAM), the C-RED Project was born in 2014, from the idea to create the fastest low noise infrared camera in the world.
Designed and produced in France in First Light’s premises, C-RED will revolutionate the world of SWIR cameras with its unprecendented performances, identical to what OCAM² is offering in the visible.
The innovation of the C-RED project is to propose to end-users a revolutionary near-infrared camera that combines incredible frame rates (2000 fps for a 320×256 pixel format) and sub-electron readout noise at the same time by taking advantage of the revolutionary Avalanche Photo Diode (APD) detector technology made of HgCdTe (MCT) photodiodes offering noiseless amplification of the signal by single electron multiplication.
Usually, SWIR cameras are based on InGaAs technology or classical MCT technology. This does not allow to decrease the noise below a certain level (about 10 e for a double readout mode) and only at the expense of very low readout speed. Our innovation is based on the use of the new e-APD MCT technology.
First Light Imaging’s C-RED is the first camera to propose this technology.
The majority of infrared cameras use InGaAs sensors which have the advantage to be used with low cooling (higher temperatures) but are not sensitive after 1.5 µm and have a readout noise several ten times higher than C-RED. Another advantage is for C-RED to propose an embedded cooling system with no maintenance needed; most of existing cooled IR cameras are liquid nitrogen cooled and need to be refilled every 4 to 10 hours.
This means that C-RED is able to detect events that remain literally invisible for them: C-RED will make visible the invisible.
There is no existing solution providing such incredible performances. Infrared e-APD is like EMCCD in the visible, making a real technological breakthrough and permitting unexpected uses of infrared light.
