Short-Wave-Infrared (SWIR) Night Glow Photon-Counting Integrated Circuit (PCIC) Focal Plane Array (FPA) Detectors and Night Vision Cameras

Almost all intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms and all small agile munitions need high-sensitivity night vision imagers for situational awareness and for target identification, tracking and discrimination. The requirements of situational awareness, responsiveness and weapon precision are ever more stringent in current and future urban warfare, where minimum collateral damage is desired. Micro unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAV), for example, require precision guidance capability to maneuver in obstruction-rich and highly cluttered urban terrain for surveillance and engagement of fixed and mobile targets. Soldiers need an infrared out-of-band night vision advantage on today's asymmetric battlefield. We need to regain the night in today's theaters. Night glow in the short-wave infrared band spanning 1,100nm, 1,300nm and 1,500 1,700nm is a consistent natural source of illumination under almost all weather conditions. Currently, even the most sensitive tactical InGaAs SWIR camera may not be sensitive enough to fully take advantage of the SWIR night glow for night vision. The proposed Photon-Counting Integrated Circuit (PCIC) offers higher sensitivity and lower noise, leading to significantly enhanced signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) to enable SWIR night vision at or near ambient temperature with mega-pixel resolution and human video frame rate for soldiers, micro-UAVs and other agile and mobile platforms.