Award Data

This Phase I Small Business Innovation Research proposal describes a means to develop a new epitaxial growth technique which as far-reaching use for increasing semiconductor laser performances in terms of power, temperature stability, and emission wavelength. The technique is most beneficial to semiconductors lasers, both edge-emitters and vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), but it a ...

Multispectral imaging has become a valuable tool in tactical imaging scenarios due to the ability to expose camouflage, identify airborne toxins and fuel plumes, and the ability to provide night vision through the use of infrared imaging. Micro-bolometer arrays work well in these situations by creating a single sensor which is sensitive from the visible to long wave IR imaging regions. The microbo ...

The need for larger, faster and higher-resolution imager chips at low cost has become more acute as image processing and optical systems improve. However, monolithic imagers having large pixel numbers are fabricated with difficulty at low yield and high cost. This proposal is directed to defect correction for high resolution imagers, in the visible, IR and UV ranges, in order to dramatically incr ...

Recent progress in self-mixing Doppler sensors have proven that measurement performance similar to that obtained with continuous-wave coherent laser radar is feasible, but with at least an order of magnitude less complexity and cost. We believe that extremely simple hardware signal processors can also be built as single chips, or at most a few chips. This points to the possibility of developing hi ...

This proposal describes a fabrication-intensive program to determine the feasibility of fabricating oxide vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (oxide VCSELs) whose unoxidized current apertures comprise lateral oxidation barriers. Although oxide VCSELs have spectacular performances (50% wallplug efficiency, etc.) their manufacturability is questionable since the oxidation process forming the cur ...

This Phase I Small Business Innovation Research describes a means to develop a misalignment-tolerant fiber-optic laser transmitter. The insensitivity to misalignment within the transmitter optical subassembly (OSA) enables passive alignment to single-mode fibers for extremely low-cost, high-performance applications such as fiber-to-the-desk (FTTD) and network access modules. The OSA is based on ...

High-density reconfigurable optical routing interconnect is introduced in this SBIR program for optical signal processing. This structure is based on three key features: 1) Polarization manipulation using 2-D spatial light modulators; 2) polarization complementary geometry; and 3) the throw-away undesired optical energies design. The polarization manipulation provides the basis for "no-moving" par ...

AstroPower proposes to develop a new ultra-thin gallium arsenide solar cell for space applications, that will result in significantly higher performance compared to conventional gallium arsenide and silicon solar cells. This design incorporates a "floating" junction on the front of the ultra-thin solar cell and a collecting junction at the back of the device. This design will significantly decreas ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I program will determine the practicality of increasing the second harmonic (SH) output of frequency doubling devices by at least 5 times current gutput powers. Altos has demonstrated in preliminary experiments have a 2 times to 3 times increase in SH output by creating thermal gradients across the waveguide structures used to frequency double the lase ...

This proposal describes an experimental program to determine the feasibility of fabricating long-wavelength (>1.3um) oxide vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs). It addresses the two most inhibiting difficulties in fabricating practical long-wavelength VCSELs: 1) Use of oxidized layers in the bottom mirror results in a mirror thickness reduction from ~7um to