BREAKING BARRIERS TO COLLABORATION
THE VISTA ADVANTAGE
In the VISTA program, scientists developed a new class of materials for a critical component of an infrared camera sensor: infrared focal plane arrays. Analogous to your eye’s retina, the infrared focal plane array detects and absorbs the infrared signature. Historically, infrared focal plane arrays for advanced systems have been costly and hard to produce and have relied on components from other countries. Additionally, advanced infrared focal plane arrays require cooling to low temperatures, which can lead to higher size, weight and power (SWAP) demands and shorter life spans.
III-V antimony-based infrared focal plane arrays address these issues. When we say “III-V,” we are referring to the material elements in columns III and V of the periodic table. Improvements in manufacturing technologies to grow thin film crystals in the 1990s have enabled better control of the material’s electrical properties, allowing engineers to grow layers of these III-V ele- ments on gallium antimonide substrates. Fabricators then etch, dice and hybridize multiple detectors from each substrate to make focal plane arrays.
III-V strained layer superlattice (SLS) infrared focal plane arrays can theoreti- cally provide better performance than traditional II-VI technology at a much lower cost. Additionally, III-V SLS offers many of the benefits that DOD is seeking, such as SWAP and yield, because it can operate at higher tempera- tures for some applications. It can also be made repeatedly with extremely high operability and uniformity, and all of its components are made in the United States.
—CERDEC NVESD
Tus, VISTA pioneered a new strategy model—horizontal
integration using
trusted entities (HIUTE)—with these key components:
• Engage the user community. • Use trusted entities to share break- throughs between competitors. • Facilitate industrial buy-in.
Te warfighter is an invaluable compo- nent in the horizontal integration model, providing feedback while understanding and accepting that
it may take several
attempts to overcome hard technical challenges.
“We knew the first order of business for VISTA was to get buy-in and direction from the broadest user community in DOD,” said Dr. Donald Reago, NVESD director. “So we established a stakehold- ers review board that set goals at the onset of the program and then re-evaluated progress and goals on an annual basis. By doing so, we knew we had the user com- munity’s interest at the forefront, and we stayed on top of changes as VISTA progressed.”
VISTA set out to do what many thought was impossible: challenge industry and DOD to develop and mature new sen- sor component technologies, establish a completely new industrial base and have the technology ready for transition in just five years. All of that represents a considerable challenge, given that pre- cursor sensor development efforts took more than 50 years to reach their current capability.
CHANGING FOCUS To overcome these obstacles and embrace the challenge, DOD engineers and sci- entists had to develop an entirely new model for engaging with industry that used horizontal integration rather than
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vertical stovepipes and leveraged trusted entities to share intellectual capital, while preserving the integrity of a competitive environment.
It’s a model that could bring partici- pants together cooperatively to work on a challenge of national importance. Dr. Meimei Tidrow, VISTA program manager and chief scientist for focal plane arrays at NVESD, explained, “We needed an innovative model. We needed stakeholders with buy-in power and sci- entists with world-class talent. And even more difficult, we needed industry play- ers that were willing to work together, even if they were competitors.”
VISTA’s stakeholder review board included senior members of the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Recon- naissance Organization.
LEVERAGING NEW PLAYERS Te trusted entities in the horizontal integration model are leading research- ers in DOD—the scientists who perform important research and development that leads to breakthroughs. For VISTA, these scientists came from NVESD, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL), the
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory.
Army AL&T Magazine
July-September 2016
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