IR Laboratories - New Home for Noble Peak Technology

As EF mentioned in comments to Stratio post, IR Laboratories acquired the assets of NoblePeak Vision Corp, the developer of TriWave Ge-enhanced CMOS SWIR FPA's, in 2010.

From the company's whitepaper:

"NoblePeak Vision has solved the problem of growing thick, pure defect free germanium on silicon with its TriWave® technology. Figure 2 shows schematically our growth technique which traps dislocations by exploiting their characteristic diagonal propagation. A single crystal seed emerges from the narrow aperture and serves as a crystalline template for a large defect-free island. The island is formed after silicon transistor formation. The conventional back-end of the CMOS process then proceeds as usual, with alternating layers of dielectric and metal used to interconnect transistors and to connect the germanium photodiode to the circuitry."

"Figure 3 shows a scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of one such island integrated into a 180 nm CMOS process with three levels of metal and a reflow micro lens used to increase fill factor. TriWave detectors of size from 2 um to 5.6 um and imaging arrays with pixels of size 7 um and 10 um have been fabricated in this technology."

"Figure 5 shows the measured spectral response compared to theoretical predictions for bulk germanium at 220K. The cut off is at longer wavelength than predicted, due to grown-in strain."

VGA Tri-Wave sensor:

• Package Cu W base, Covar lid, 26 pin, AR Sapphire window
• 21mm x 21mm x 13.5mm
• Hermetically sealed, Xenon backfilled
• 4-stage TEC provides cooling to -80 C in ambient temperatures up to +40C