MANTIS – Miniature Affordable Novel Thermal Infrared Sensor

The Navy requires High Performance MWIR Sensor for Intermittent Deployment. A key aspect of the requirement is that the sensor can be provided in volume at very low cost. Navy has several applications with limited number of survivable missions which cannot afford current $50,000+ HD MWIR cameras. SAAZ team understands Navy’s needs as the team members have been working on lowering the cost of MWIR camera components for over two decades. Mr. Atul Joshi, the PI of this effort, used to be the senior director of camera operations at Teledyne Imaging. At Teledyne he led a team to develop one of the first low SWaP-C HOT MWIR cameras during 2005-2010. The team consisted of Teledyne business groups developing MCT detectors, ROICs, dewars, electronics, optics, systems engineering and sensor integration. The HOT MWIR cameras developed were benchmarked to be best in SWaP-C compared to contemporary camera from Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, FLIR, DRS, L3, and other prominent suppliers.  There have been further developments in lowering the cost of thermal infrared cameras over the last decade, but they do not meet the Navy’s needs stated above. Currently microbolometer based uncooled LWIR camera have come down significantly in cost. They cost less than $2,000 in volumes of 1,000s, at least for VGA resolutions. SAAZ has developed such camera for primes. However, several applications cannot use microbolometers as they require improved performance offered by MWIR. Cryogenically cooled MWIR cameras still cost several tens of thousands, often the best performing ones over $50,000.   For the last eight years the SAAZ team has been working on reducing the cost of cooled MWIR sensors. The team proposes to leverage all those developments and retire residual risk for the Navy under the phase-I SBIR so that a working ultra-low-cost camera can be successfully demonstrated within the phase-II. The key innovations are summarized below: ROIC – an 8-micron pitch ROIC that is already commercialized will be used to reduce the risk  Detector – New advances in HOT MCT technology will be utilized as it is the highest operating temperature detector (by far) available in this band Cooling and package – A new TEC package is proposed that allows the detector to cool to the desired temperature while keeping the package cost extremely low Electronics – SAAZ has developed camera electronics on a chip (ASIC) that will reduce electronics SWaP-C by >10x Optics – An innovative catadioptric telescope/lens assembly has been developed and the same concept is being modified for the proposed requirements to greatly reduce the cost of IR optics Phase I will conclude in a PDR design of the novel low-cost camera design offering 3x to 10x SWaP-C improvement. Phase-I option is proposed to prototype critical components based on the phase-I design. Phase-I option will conclude in a lab demo of these components with the team ready to assemble the complete camera in phase-II.