Fengyun-4 (FY-4) is the first of Chinese new-generation geostationary quantitative remote sensing meteorological satellite. One of the FY-4 main payloads, multiple channel scanning radiation imager, is reputed to be the clairvoyance of FY-4. It is the most advanced scanning imager of Chinese geostationary meteorological satellite. That is just related to the greatly improved crucial part named infrared detectors. Compared with the current operational satellite Fengyun-2 (FY-2), the infrared detectors of FY-4 satellite have been made great progress as follows: Firstly, the number of infrared channels are increased from 4 to 8; Secondly, the wavelength of infrared detectors has been extended to 13.8 μm; Thirdly, the single responsive element infrared chips have been developed to multi-element linear array; Lastly, the responsive area of the infrared detectors is only 56 μm×56 μm, that is the minimum size of the infrared detectors used on all the meteorological satellites developed by China so far. That makes the researchers meet with new problems and difficulties in preparing the infrared detectors of FY-4 scanning radiation imager, such as: restricting optical responsive area to form shortwavelength and midwavelength photovoltaic (PV) devices, narrower effective field of view of photoconductive (PC) detectors of water vapor channel and high performance requirements of longwave photoconductive detectors. This paper introduces the development process and technical keys of the smallest “Clairvoyance” of Chinese meteorological satellite, the HgCdTe infrareddetector chips of FY-4 multiple channel scanning radiation imager.
