THE HAWAII INFRARED DETECTOR ARRAYS - TESTING AND ASTRONOMICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF PROTOTYPE AND SCIENCE-GRADE DEVICES

Two generations of prototypes of a HgCdTe infrared detector array with 1024 X 1024 pixels developed by the Rockwell International Science Ce nter have been tested in the new Quick Infrared Camera(17) (QUIRC) and an upgraded version of KSPEC(18), a cross-dispersed near-infrared spe ctrograph, on the University of Hawaii 2.2 m telescope. The HAWAII (Hg CdTe Astronomical Wide Area Infrared Imager) prototype devices achieve d very good performance. The read-noise in correlated double sampling (CDS) is between 10 and 15 e(-) rms, depending on the conditions of th e operations and the way read-noise is computed. The quantum efficienc y in H and K is above 50%. The full-well capacity is above 10(5) e at 0.5 V applied detector bias and is, in our system, limited by the dyna mic range of the A/D converter. The residual excess dark-current probl em known from NICMOS-3 devices (Hodapp et al., 1992) [PASP, 104, 441] is not fully resolved. However, it appears less serious in our first H AWAII prototype devices. Using KSPEC, operation under low background c onditions has been tested. At an operating temperature of 65 K, and us ing up to 128 samples of multi-sampling, a read-noise of < 5 e(-) and a dark current < 1 e(-) /min has bean demonstrated. Tests of fast sub- array reads for wavefront sensing were conducted using QUIRC. For a su b-array frame repeat time of 11 ms, a read-noise of 6 e(-) has been de monstrated. An engineering-grade second-generation HAWAII device with relable hybridization is now in routine operation in KSPEC. The first science-grade HAWAII device has now been installed in the QUIRC camera and is in routine operation.