Solar expo to be North America’s largest
SEMI (San Jose, CA), the global industry association for the manufacture of semiconductors, displays, photovoltaic cells, and related products, and Freiburg Wirtschaft Touristik und Messe, together with Solar Promotion, organizers of Intersolar, the world’s largest trade fair for solar technology, announced a partnership to host Intersolar North America. The new exposition will be the largest trade event serving the full solar-energy supply chain in the United States, and will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco July 15-17 in conjunction with SEMICON West.
BAE to lead DARPA imaging program
BAE Systems received an $18.5 million, 30-month contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a new class of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems and capabilities. BAE Systems will lead DARPA’s Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) program. The company will develop, integrate, and demonstrate advanced ISR systems and capabilities for wide-area persistent monitoring for use in Department of Defense unmanned and manned surveillance platforms. The program’s goal is to develop a compact system combining a multigigapixel, high-resolution sensor; wide-field optics; an ultrahigh-bandwidth, real-time airborne processing system; and a ground station for interactive multitarget designation, tracking, and exploitation.
Partnership targets 1064 nm single-photon counting
Princeton Lightwave (Cranbury, NJ) and id Quantique (Geneva, Switzerland) initiated development of the world’s first single-photon-counting module optimized for 1064 nm by combining an optimized avalanche photodiode with integrated biasing and quenching electronics. It is currently difficult to detect single-photons at a wavelength close to 1064 nm with high efficiency, low noise, and low jitter. This region of the spectrum lies at the edge of the sensitivity of both silicon and indium gallium arsenide avalanche photodiodes. The collaboration will close this detection hole by providing optimized detectors that target applications in the growing fields of free-space quantum-key distribution, remote sensing, and spectroscopy.
Army chooses Kopin ‘Instant-On’ display
Kopin (Taunton, MA), manufacturer of microdisplays for mobile consumer and military applications, announced the adoption of its new CyberDisplay 640M LVR for use in the U.S. Army’s new thermal-weapon-sight program, the TWS Bridge, which has potential volumes exceeding 150,000 units. This high-tech display is specifically designed to operate at temperatures as low as -40°C with nearly “Instant-On” capability. This performance is achieved without the need for an external heater, significantly reducing display system power consumption.
Dental imaging contracts placed with e2v
e2v technologies (Essex, England) signed orders with three existing key dental imaging customers worth a total of $28.9 million dollars for its x-ray-sensitive CCDs. These systems offer high-performance image capture, instantly viewable on a PC monitor with significantly lower radiation doses than film. “These contracts, which were anticipated, demonstrate the continued strength of our position within the global dental imaging marketplace and are also an early indicator of stabilization within the sector following a period of industry consolidation,” Keith Attwood, chief executive of e2v said,
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Also in the news . . .
PennWell (Tulsa, OK), parent company of Laser Focus Worldmagazine (Nashua, NH), acquired a 51% interest in iCommerce & Marketing, which operates RenewableEnergyAccess.com, an online-only publication and business-to-business community for renewable energy, including photovoltaics. . . . As part of its existing Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) policy, imaging company Andor (Belfast, Northern Ireland) has put in place projects and initiatives to recycle waste and reduce energy use and has achieved the ISO 14001:2004 accreditation for its Environment Management System. . . . Uni-Pixel (The Woodlands, TX), developer of flat-panel color-display technology called time-multiplexed optical shutter (TMOS), announced it has reached an agreement with the MiPlaza Facility at the High Tech Campus (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) to develop and assemble TMOS prototype units for demonstration. . . . Qualcomm MEMS Technologies (QMT), a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm, and Chinese manufacturer Hisense Communication announced the industry’s first collaboration slated to bring to market mobile phones with Qualcomm microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) displays in 2008.