66.73 (-0.02) Raytheon has developed and is offering uncooled infrared (IR) products required by integrators of military and commercial systems. Both focal plane assemblies (FPA) and full-up IR cameras are available, with a choice of formats of either 320 × 240 or 640 × 480.
The FPAs are programmable on a frame-by-frame basis. This allows the user control over variables such as those that affect device performance: integration capacitor size, integration time, and output amplifier gain setting. The FPAs also provide for non-uniformity corrections (NUC) on a pixel-by-pixel basis, which allows the device to be optimized for an extremely high degree of detector array uniformity.
The IR cameras come calibrated from the factory. They are pre-programmed to operate over a wide environmental temperature range while maintaining a high level of sensitivity.
Many performance specifications are shared across all uncooled IR products:
- pixel pitch 25µm
- NEDT = 50mK (for F/1.0 at 300K)
- operating ambient temperature range -46ºC to +71ºC
- thermal time constant < 16ms
- spectral range 7.5µm to 13.6µm
- dewar vacuum life > 10 years
- pixel operability > 98%
Raytheon's uncooled IR technology has a wide variety of applications: missile seekers and warners; pilot and driver vision enhancement; thermal weapons sights; chemical and narcotic detection and identification; and industrial quality and process control. Due to its performance and cost Raytheon's uncooled IR technology is the right choice for any system with IR imaging at its core.
