NANOHMICS INC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: AF16-AT22

NANOHMICS INC — STTR Phase I award from Department of Defense.

Amount
$149,999
Agency
Department of Defense · Air Force
Program / Phase
STTR · Phase I
Topic
AF16-AT22
Solicitation
2016.0
NAICS
Place of performance
TX
Period
2016-09-26 → 2017-06-21

Description

Recent breakthroughs in the fabrication of InAs/GaSb-based strained layer superlattice (SLS) structures with Type II band alignment has made possible the manufacture of high-performance MWIR/LWIR detectors and LEDs. The main advantages of Type-II SLS (T2SL) are: (1) wide spectral response and emission (3-30 m) by adjusting the thickness of SLS layers and bandgap engineering, (2) high composition uniformity due to high III-V material quality, (3) smaller dark current due to large effective masses of the carriers and lower auger recombination rate, and (4) high quantum efficiency because of the direct bandgap. Most importantly, since Type II SLS consists of traditional III-V semiconductors, mature processing technologies can be applied during SLS-based detector fabrication. As a result, Type II SLS-based IRLEDs with tunable spectra have very high potential to be employed in high performance IRSP systems. Nanohmics Inc. proposes to develop Type II SLS-based IRLEDs with novel light extraction enhancement (LEE) to improve the overall device quantum efficiency.