QWIP Status at THALES

Since 2002, the THALES Group has been manufacturing sensitive arrays using QWIP technology based on GaAs and related III–V compounds, at the Alcatel-Thales-III-V Lab (formerly part of THALES Research and Technology Laboratory). past researchers claimed many advantages of QWIPs. Uniformity was one of these and has been the key parameter for the production to start. Another widely claimed advantage for QWIPs was the so-called band-gap engineering and versatility of the III–V processing allowing the custom design of quantum structures to fulfil the requirements of specific applications such as very long wavelength (VLWIR) or multi-spectral detection. In this presentation, we give the status of our LWIR QWIP production line, and also the current status of QWIPs for MWIR (<5 μm) and VLWIR (>15 μm) arrays. QWIP technology cannot cover the full electromagnetic spectrum, we develop other semiconductor compounds for SWIR and UV applications. We present here the status of our 320 × 256 SWIR module with InGaAs photodiodes.