Infrared technology

Any chinese firms manufacturing IR FPA? We know there are alot commercial silicon fabs in CHina but what about special material fabs?
If they lack those, the government need to form some JVs to get those special fabs going. IR require special material which is non-silicon.

There will a fairly large demand for the commercial infrared camera also. So, it will a good investment.
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It's formed by staring-plane array focal plane array (FPA) is an image sensing device consisting an array of light sensing pixels at the focal plane of a lens.

Modern FPAs are available up to 2048 x2048 pixels. and larger sizes are in developement.

FPAs have to use special materials. Visible imagers such CCD and CMOS image sensor can use silicon, but silicon is only sensitive to only visible and near IR spectra.

IR FPAs need exotic materials like mercury-cadmium-telluride, Indium Antimonide, Indium Gallium Arsenide and Vanadium Oxide. and logic and control circuit will use silicon.

Some FPAs can operate only at cryogenic temp and others like Vanadium Oxide can be uncooled. The device operate cryogenically otherwise thermal noise will swarm the detected signals. It's cooled by lquid nitrogen. liquid helium or thermo-electric cooler.

Since the pixels can exhibit non-uniformity in detection they need to be calibrated. This can be done is software DSP FPGA of the camera electronics.

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Holy smoke, bonanza source of IR tech

Any chinese firms manufacturing IR FPA? We know there are alot commercial silicon fabs in CHina but what about special material fabs?

Click to expand...

Just use google.

during the last zhuhai air show, A Chinese firm located in Wuhan displayed third gen. IR imaging detector.
aside from detector,also display commercial IR imaging camera.

challenge said:

during the last zhuhai air show, A Chinese firm located in Wuhan displayed third gen. IR imaging detector.
aside from detector,also display commercial IR imaging camera.

Click to expand...

what's the brand name? I am curious to see if they own the tech and process. If they do then good chances, they can work to expand into the high end military usage such as for missile system.

If they purchase the lens from the third party sources and just assemble them togther, then it's rather limited.

The problem for a military system is to package the IIR focal plane array, it's associated gyros, guidance control section and cooling into something that fits into a small 127-152 mm diameter package like an air to air missile. This is not a trivial engineering problem. The Soviets never got there, even with Stingers taken from Afghanistan to study. It's one thing to have the pieces, but knowing how to manufacture them is another thing entirely. China so far has not reached this level of technology either.

Stinger used by Afghans in the 80s did not have IIR guidance. First US antiair missile in service to use that tech is, i believe, aim-9x.

While we may say it is likely china hasnt reached that level of technology, we just don't know that, as pretty much everything is kept secret anyway. We can't be sure if chinese AAMs will feature IIR tech in 2 years or in 12 years.

PL-10 is already in testing.