SBIR-STTR Award

Wallace Instruments proposes to design a flexible and high performance electronic and data acquisition system that will operate all current and next generation Infrared Focal Plane Arrays (IRFPA's). This system will allow new IRFPA's to be used in the field almost immediately upon their release, eliminating the long delays and high costs associated with designing and building custom support systems. Surveys of DoD and civilian researchers will determine features and performance goals for the system. Surveys of IRFPA manufacturers will ensure that the system will operate with all next generation IRFPA's. Additional system objectives are compact size, moderate cost, and ease of use. The system will be configured for different IRFPA's with software, and will not require hardware or wiring changes when changing IRFPA's. Key areas of development will include high speed IRFPA drive electronics and preamplifiers, very fast high resolution multichannel data acquisition, signal processors for data reduction, and optical fiber data interfaces. Breadboard experiments will verify the technical feasibility of the performance objectives. Successful completion of this work will lead directly to the construction and evaluation of a complete system in the Phase II program.

Wallace Instruments proposes to develop a flexible and high performance drive electronics and data acquisition system that will operate all current and next generation Infrared Focal Plane Arrays (IRFPA's). The system will be configured for use with different IRFPA's completely through software. A key feature of this system is the ability to support the new 1024 x 1024 IRFPA's from Rockwell and SBRC in full frame operation at their maximum frame rates. By using parallel DSP's greater than 32 million pixels per second can be processed prior to storage or transmission over a network interface. The proposed system is designed specifically for field use in observatories and industrial settings. It meets the needs of both the DoD space object identification and the civilian astronomy communities. This system may be operated locally, or remotely through an ethernet or FDDI link. It is capable of completely unattended operation over a network. The architectural and electronic design of this system were successfully completed in Phase I. Phase II work will include mechanical design, software development, and system tests, and will result in delivery of a fully functional prototype of the system.