PRINCETON, N.J. - U.S. Air Force scientists are looking to Sensors Unlimited Inc. of Princeton, N.J., to develop a smart, multifunction, dual-wavelength combination video camera and communications tool for night-vision surveillance and reconnaissance applications.
Sensors Unlimited designers will use indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) infrared focal-plane-array technology to build cameras that are able not only to produce images simultaneously in two wavebands - visible and shortwave infrared - but also that can double as communications devices.
These cameras will produce high-resolution focal-plane-array images that use light wavelengths from 400 to 1,700 nanometers without distinguishing between separate wavelengths. The cameras will produce combined visible/shortwave infrared images.
Sensors Unlimited specializes in InGaAs near-infrared detectors. The company’s MiniCameras are in use by the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Air Force wants the company’s experts to expand on their existing technology.
“The InGaAs platform makes possible an intrinsically smaller, lighter, more robust and more economical dual-spectrum camera that sees all eye-safe military laser illuminators, designators, and now communication lasers,” explains Tara Martin, research engineer and project director for Sensors Unlimited.
The company is working under terms of a $750,000 small business innovative research grant from the U.S. Air Force.
Sensors Unlimited officials say their company’s uncooled visible-InGaAs MiniCamera has no moving parts, and is thermoelectrically temperature stabilized to be lightweight, compact, and suited for helmet-mounted applications such as imaging and communications.
The Air Force contract to Sensors Unlimited has three primary goals: improve sensitivity in the visible waveband, enable the camera also to function as a 1-GHz communications link by using one pixel in the camera’s detector array, and reduce pixel pitch from the camera’s current 40-micron pitch down to 15 microns.
Sensors Unlimited experts say they plan to deliver a high-resolution 128-by-128-pixel focal-plane array to the Air Force, as well as the camera electronics to run the enhanced array, even though the contract requires only a 25-by-25-pixel array.
For more information contact Sensors Unlimited on the World Wide Web at www.sensorsinc.com.
