Nova Sensors Discusses Imaging Solutions For Military Applications At SPIE DSS 2012

Tony Vengel, VP of business development at Nova Sensors, gives an overview of his company and its capabilities, and introduces us to: several cameras designed for integration into UAVs and manned aircraft, a custom two-board stack that was designed for an MWIR camera, a SWIR camera, and more.

Video Transcript

Tony Vengel: Hi. I am Tony Vengel, vice president of business development for Nova Sensors, a Teledyne majority-owned company. We are located in Solvang, CA. We build cameras and camera electronics. We design our camera electronics around third-party vendors of manufacturers of focal planes to include Santa Barbara Focalplane and their whole line of midwave focal planes.

We also build shortwave infrared cameras by our InGaAs from Teledyne Judson among some other folks. The camera that I am introducing here is a 1280 x 1024. It is an nBn-based camera operating at 150 Kelvin. It has a 12-micron pixel pitch, and it has an operability of 99.5.

The other camera that we have is a 640 x 512, 15-micron pixel pitch and has a small set of electronics that weigh 25 grams. The whole camera itself is 295 grams and is made and designed to fit inside gimbals that fly on UAVs or manned aircraft.

Again, Nova Sensors is an expert in designing camera electronics for anybody’s focal plane. We do production. We have TRL-9 level cameras that are production-ready, but we can also do custom. We designed these electronics - this little two-board stack that fits on our midwave infrared camera and can also do this for shortwave.

We design these camera electronics in less than 2½ months. What type of camera do you need and what type of camera electronics would you like? We build small optimized for size, weight, and power for UAVs, handheld, and manned platforms.

The camera that I am talking about right here is a shortwave infrared 640 x 512 25-micron. We are in the process of developing a 1280 x 1024 with a 15-micron pixel with the lowest noise in the industry of less than 10 electrons per pixel.

This particular camera on the left is a Santa Barbara Focalplane readout and detector built inside a Teledyne Judson dewar and with our camera electronics. It has a 15 to 300 continuous zoom lens built by Ophir and is optimized for gimbal applications inside manned platforms, manned ground platforms.

To synopsize, Nova Sensors builds compact camera electronics for anybody’s focal plane and can do it in short order. We are located in Solvang, CA. We do custom but we also do production. Please feel free to give me a call at 805-245-9979 or come by and see us in Solvang, CA.