Mosaicked Multispectral Focal Plane Arrays

A mosaicked sensor is a monolithic array of many sensors, arranged in a geometric pattern. In the commercial digital color camera market, the mosaicked color filter array (CFA) technique is widely used, in which instead of using three charged coupled devices (CCDs) to capture the red, green, and blue spectral bands for each pixel, each pixel is associated with just one device covered by an optical filter sensitive to a specified wavelength. In this way, only one spectral component is sensed at each pixel and the other spectral components must be estimated from neighboring pixels. The CFA overlayer is fabricated in a sequence of conventional steps that places a filter of a wavelength-selective material over each cell in a pattern according to a specific sensor design.