ALPHACORE INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF191-054

Description

In response to Department of defense SBIR topicAF191-054, Alphacore Inc. will develop a Develop fast-framing SWIR camera for digital-holographic detection (aka coherent and spatial-heterodyne detection). The needed camera should be sensitive to SWIR wavelengths, have at least 256 x 256 pixels region of interest (ROI) with 5kfps (kiloframes per second) frame rate and 32x32 ROI with 40kfps frame rate. One of the main objectives is to have the pixel well-depth size at least 4X the read-noise variance. This topic is an excellent match to Alphacore since the company has been developing the world’s fastest megapixel-class CMOS image sensor and camera for the last 3 years. The in-house designed CMOS image sensor in the camera is sensitive to visible wavelengths and it has readout capability for the full 1,024 x 1,024 pixel array at a continuous 10,000fps frame rate, for 256x256 ROI at 40,000fps frame rate and for 32x32 ROI at 320,000fps frame rate. Alphacore thinks that these types of frame rate specifications can also be achieved with a SWIR camera that uses the developed CMOS image sensor readout circuitry as the basis of the readout integrated circuit (ROIC) of an InGaAs focal plane array (FPA).