News

5 June 2009

 

Teledyne wins $18.8m DARPA contract for terahertz electronics

Teledyne Technologies Inc of Thousand Oaks, CA, USA says that its subsidiary Teledyne Scientific & Imaging LLC (TS&I) has been awarded a contract from the Microsystems Technology Office of the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) to develop terahertz electronics devices and integrated circuits.

Under DARPA’s Terahertz Electronics (THz) program, TS&I will pursue advances in transistor technology, circuit design and circuit packaging to demonstrate receiver and transmitter blocks operating at frequencies greater than 1THz. The initial Phase 1 contract is valued at $8.3m over a 24 month period. If all contract phases proceed, the total contract value would be $18.8m for work performed through 2014.

Circuits will be designed and fabricated using TS&I's indium phosphide (InP) heterojuction bipolar transistor (HBT) technology. Transistor bandwidths will be extended to THz frequencies by scaling transistor dimensions to less than 100nm and implementing innovative fabrication processes, says Teledyne. A silicon micro-machining process will also be developed for forming batch-manufactured waveguide blocks for circuit integration.

For the purposes of the program, TS&I says that it has put together a team consisting of the leading research groups from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of California at San Diego, and Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems. The suite of technologies developed under the program should benefit a large class of radio frequency (RF) and mixed-signal circuits for Department of Defense applications, it concludes.

See related item:

DARPA awards Northrop Grumman Terahertz Electronics contract

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