This paper presents an investigation of the responsivity of a time-delay integration (TDI) charge-coupled device that employs anti-blooming clocking and uses a varying number of TDI stages. The influence of charge blooming caused by unused TDI stages in a TDI deployed selection scheme is shown experimentally, and an anti-blooming clocking mechanism is analyzed. The impact of blooming on sensor characteristics, such as the responsivity, the conversion gain, and the signal-to-noise ratio, is investigated. A comparison of the measurements with and without this anti-blooming clocking mechanism is presented and discussed in detail.
Keywords: blooming; charge-coupled device; conversion gain; photon transfer curve; responsivity; signal-to-noise ratio; time delay integration.