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March 10, 2004
For Immediate Release
LOS ANGELES, March 9, 2004—HRL Laboratories, LLC today announced a revolutionary device that will dramatically improve the effectiveness of millimeter wave imaging, meeting several critical homeland security and battlefield needs. Millimeter waves provide an even greater ability to “see through” obscurations than current state-of-the-art infrared radiation. Prototype cameras are already being developed to detect concealed weapons and explosives hidden beneath clothing. Navigation applications include enhanced air, land, and sea guidance through such poor visibility conditions as fog, rain, smoke, and sandstorms.
The sensor, using HRL-proprietary technology, is based on an inexpensive antimonide-based semiconductor fabrication process. The device is technically an innovative “square-law” detector diode. The current device of choice for millimeter wave imagers is the Schottky diode. The curvature in a Schottky current-voltage characteristic rectifies incoming power to produce a proportional DC voltage offset, providing one pixel of a millimeter wave camera. For low-input-power levels, such as occur in the applications suggested above, the Schottky must be biased to turn on the current.
The HRL device uses the staggered (Type II) band gap line-up of indium arsenide and gallium antimonide to produce the required curvature—with no bias at all. The HRL device advantage occurs because the main culprits in reducing the sensitivity of these detectors are the “Shot” and “1/f” noise that derive from and are proportional to the bias. Both culprits are totally absent in the HRL zero-bias device. The result is an order-of-magnitude improvement in the sensitivity figure-of-merit, the noise-equivalent-power (NEP), as has recently been confirmed by measurements at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colorado.
HRL has produced and delivered several hundred thousand diodes to Trex Enterprises Corporation (San Diego, California unit) for their advanced camera now under development, proving the HRL diode’s high reliability at low cost. This breakthrough will enable the practical implementation of millimeter wave imaging for a wide range of military and commercial applications in the near future.
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HRL Laboratories, LLC is a corporate R&D laboratory owned by Boeing, General
Motors, and Raytheon. HRL provides custom R&D and performs additional R&D
contract services for its three owners, for the U.S. government, and for other
commercial entities.