Het potentieel van POET is echt enorm. Lees 't gedeelte over de Military & Space sectie op pagina 24:
POET’s technology platform for optoelectronic integration is designed to exploit the optoelectronic and electronic behaviors of GaAs semiconductor material. One of the benefits of this material, from a space electronics perspective, is that GaAs is significantly less susceptible to x-ray and gamma-ray total integrated dose radiation. GaAs has been a long-standing choice for high-frequency devices and circuits, though GaAs digital devices do not provide the performance that metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor devices provide. Currently, the POET platform is being utilized within a NASA deep space probe initiative.
Important to military applications are the electronic devices that can be integrated into the POET design architecture, including both complementary heterostructure field effect transistors and complementary HBTs. These transistors will enable both analog and digital functions in POET hybrid optoelectronic devices. The technology also provides a number of key, integrable opto-electronic devices: resonant vertical cavity lasers, detectors, amplifiers and modulators for out-of-plane operation. In addition, a novel innovation enables in-plane waveguide and traveling wave operation for lasers, detectors, modulators, amplifiers and directional coupler switches. Important to the military is POET’s potential to integrate digital, radio frequency and optical technologies in a single device, which is designed to satisfy the documented high-performance capability needs for multiple space systems of all military departments and agency technology areas.
POET’s architecture, which incorporates a dense mix of active optical elements and optical waveguides together with logic and mixed signal elements, is designed to enable a wide variety of space-system components including 40GB/s polarization diversity receivers, radiation hardened digital signal processor chips, 1THz transmitters and receivers, 40 GB/s optical transponders and ultraviolet, visible and infrared imaging. These components, when developed, could be combined to enable a number of applications including high speed transceivers for laser communications, radio frequency transceivers, radiofrequency and optical phased arrays, opto-electronic interconnects, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, uncooled visible, mid-wavelength infrared and long-wave infrared imagers, optical memory, opto-electronic and radio frequency apertures, ultra-wide-band sources and receivers, low-light-level sensors, single photon counters and optical correlators.
Using inter-sub-band absorption for the ultraviolet, infrared and visible light detector, POET could have the ability to offer a low-cost monolithic solution to multi-spectral imaging. The compact array could provide: (i) detection, readout and analog-to-digital conversion on a single chip; (ii) a common axis for ultraviolet, visible and infrared imaging; (iii) wavelength scanning; and (iv) 300K operation with no cooling required. The Space Situational Awareness Tech Area (“SSA”) has indicated that this technology addresses SSA sensor requirements by providing required capability with significantly reduced size, weight and power. In addition, the Air Force Communications Command and Control Division (“C3”) Tech Area Plan identifies mid- and long-term space communication and C3 technology challenges that require the photonic applications that POET is designed to provide.
After testing, the Air Force Commercialization Pilot Program (“CPP”) selected POET’s ultraviolet/infrared/visible imaging technology project as their candidate for an AFRL grant to fund the POET transition program and Phase III effort. Utilizing AFRL funding, the Company and BAE have entered into a transition program to jointly produce the POET platform and take it to production. Furthermore, BAE and other military prime contractors have expressed interest in using the POET platform in systems/subsystems for their Department of Defense customers. Additionally, a qualifier for receiving CPP funding is the acknowledgement of the firm’s willingness to commercialize a portion of the funded technology, thus providing commercial customers access to packaged parts, enabling the technology to be adopted for commercial and military systems.