SBIR-STTR Award

With the proliferation of anti-satellite weapons (ASat), traditional space sensors have become vulnerable due to their large size, heavy weight and expensive cost. Novel sensors are needed to reduce size, weight and cost to increase space system redundancy and resilience while maintaining or even enhancing performance compared with existing in-space sensors. Although extremely small, light in weight and inexpensive, today's consumer cell phone cameras are not sensitive enough at low light levels and cannot meet the performance requirements of many small spacecraft platforms. Space-based cameras typically still must be large to deliver high quality images. To capture enough photons for detection, each pixel must be large enough, leading directly to large high-resolution focal plane array (FPA) image sensor chips, and hence large and heavy camera optical systems. Therefore, one of the critical bottlenecks to the miniaturization of pixels, high-resolution FPA sensor chips and hence imaging optics is pixel photon detection sensitivity. Proposed is our novel uncooled radiation-hard InGaAs short-wave infrared (SWIR) Photon-Sensing Integrated Circuit (PSIC) to provide the highest sensitivity for high-resolution low-light-level imaging, and to serve as imager payload for small spacecrafts. The same technology will be extended to GHz high-speed PSIC detector for the most sensitive GHz lidar.

During Phase I, we have successfully designed the radiation-hard uncooled InGaAs SWIR PSIC, calibrated critical fabrication process steps, fabricated a test PSIC, and characterized a PSIC device. This characterization result unequivocally proves the supe