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Ambient temperature effects on IR sensing performance
Ambient temperature has a direct impact on how reliably infrared (IR) sensors can detect weak signals. As temperature rises, several internal device parameters drift, changing both sensitivity and noise performance.
Higher temperatures increase the thermal generation of charge carriers, which raises the dark current that creates the baseline noise floor of the detector. This extra noise can swamp low-level signals, reduce signal-to-noise ratio and shorten IR system range, especially in time-of-flight and LiDAR systems. In conventional InGaAs APDs with InP multiplication layers, this limits how much avalanche gain you can use before noise dominates, typically capping practical gain in the 10–20 range. …
