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New U.S. Technology Makes More Powerful Thermal Imagers At Lower Cost
Thermal imaging has been a critical technology in the war in Ukraine, spotting warm targets like vehicles and soldiers in the darkest nights. Military-grade thermal imagers used on big Baba Yaga night bombers are far too expensive for drone makers assembling $400 FPV kamikaze drones who have to rely on lower-cost devices. But a new technology developed by U.S company Obsidian Sensors Inc could transform the thermal imaging market with affordable high-resolution sensors.
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Older digital cameras were based on CCDs (charge coupled devices), the current generation use more affordable CMOS imaging sensors which produce an electrical charge in response to light. The vast majority of thermal imagers use a different technology: an array of microbolometers, miniature devices whose pixels absorb infrared energy and measure the resulting change in resistance. The conventional design neatly integrates the microbolometers and the circuits which read them on the same silicon chip.
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John Hong, CEO of Obsidian Sensors based in San Diego believes he has a better approach, which can scale up to high resolution at low cost and, crucially, high volume, at established foundries. The new design does not integrate everything in one unit but separates the bolometer array from the readout circuits. This is more complex but allows a different manufacturing technique to be used.
The readout circuits are still on silicon, but the sensor array is produced on a sheet of glass, leveraging technology perfected for flat-screen TVs and mobile phone displays. Large sheets of glass are far cheaper to process than small wafers of silicon and bolometers made on glass cost about a hundred times less than on silicon.
Hong says the process can easily produce multi-megapixel arrays. Obsidian are already producing test batches of VGA sensors, and plan to move to 1280x1024 this year and 1920x1080 in 2025.
Obsidian has been quietly developing their technology for six years and are now able to produce units for evaluation at a price three to four times lower than comparable models. Further evolution of the manufacturing process will bring prices even lower.
That could bring a 640x480 VGA sensor imager down to well below $200.
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Hong says they plan to sell a thousand VGA cameras this year on a pilot production run, and are currently raising a series B to hit much larger volumes in 2025 and beyond. That should be just about right to surf the wave of demand in the next few years.
A complete VGA module is proposed on Chinese market for less than 200$
ReplyDeleteGlass sensors much cheaper but very limited performances compared to CIS
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