"This validated the system’s ability to image at 60 frames per second at 1 millilux," replicating moonless night, said Martin Pralle, VP of government programs at SiOnyx.
"That’s the point at which this becomes useful in a lot of military scenarios," he added. "We did it in their labs, on their equipment. They controlled the amount of light. We now have independently validated the camera in the Army’s premier test site." The SiOnyx sensor is said to offer a ten-fold increase in sensitivity at 1064 nm, the wavelength of choice for many laser targeting applications.
In addition to the military products, SiOnyx plans to announce a number of consumer applications requiring the enhanced IR of black silicon, which could see the technology used in computational imaging or biometrics. The SiOnyx imagers are fabricated by TSMC.
 |
| 0.9 mLux comparison of a "best-in-class" CCD (left) and SiOnyx' XQE-1310 black silicon sensor. Martin Pralle from says that this is equivalent to what the US Army saw in their recent laboratory tests. |
