OEM cores and components

Many Original Equipment Manufactureres or OEM's are willing to add the power of thermal imaging in their own products. For these OEM's HVSS offers a full range of thermal imaging cores and components such as cooled and uncooled cores. Thermal imaging cores are subsystems that are designed to permit easy integration on other systems. They provide state of the art thermal imaging technology and image processing.

The thermal imaging cores are ready to operate in any OEM environment.

Detector

Detector Materials
• MCT
– Most common LWIR detector today (1st-2nd gen)
– Also MWIR
– Needs cooling
– Difficult in larger formats
• InSb
– Most common MWIR detector today (Staring FPAs)
– Needs cooling
• QWIP
– Recent development
– LWIR, possibly MWIR
or Dual Band
– Needs cooling
– 640x480 or higher available
• Vanadium Oxide (VOx) Microbolometer
– State-of-the art in uncooled
– 640x480 available
• Amorphous Silicon (a-Si)
– Low cost uncooled alternative
• BST
– Pyroelectric detector
• InGaAs
– NIR-SWIR
• VisGaAs
– Vis-NIR

Cooled vs. Uncooled
• Sensitivity
– Cooled detectors are inherently more sensitive than uncooled detectors
– Uncooled detectors have larger pixels
– Uncooled detector technology is improving rapidly

• Aperture
– Uncooled systems use larger apertures to counter the lower sensitivity at equal fields-of-view

• Reliability
– Uncooled detectors have a larger MTBF
– Modern Stirling cooling engines have MTBF
of 6000-8000 hours

Principle of Uncooled Detectors
• Incident IR radiation heats the detector pixel

• The change in temperature changes the electrical properties of the material (e.g. resistance) which can be detected

• The change of macroscopic properties causes uncooled detectors to be slower than cooled detectors