Bill,
It was such a pleasure to read your post on the Argus 3. I haven’t heard the term SECCA in over a decade! My goodness.
At ISG we also designed our own FPA board so it would fit in a smaller enclosure. The Raytheon one was huge. However, we didn’t have Raytheon put the FPA on our board, we did it ourselves (saves on the air-miles.)
Most people will not know this albeit Bill probably does: The early 200 series BSTs had Peltiers set to stabilize at 22C while the 300 series BSTs stabilized at (I think it was) 35C and thus that core used more power most of the time.
The iris assemblies on both the EEV units and ISG units were kinda a throwback to the old PEV days. And they were unreliable as hell. In later PEV variants, ISG removed half the leaves and it helped. Then in BST, changed to a cat-eye design that never ever failed. It was good enough for firefighting application.
So, Raytheon killed the BST product line because they had a new program to replace it – and I can’t for the life of me remember the name of program – it wasn’t the ASI, it was something else ferroelectric also. Bill may recall. In any event, the new technology never came out of engineering at Raytheon.
Raytheon used to bump-bond the pixels to the readout and in the early days, I understand they lost half of them to yield. But over time, and towards the end, they really did perfect that process and yields were in the very high 90’s I was told. And, in typical fashion, when everything was going great, they killed the program. Chris Bade was the RTI boss man at the time. We did not agree with their decision. Seems bigger companies have a cancer of bringing people in from outside the infrared space to hold very key positions and they end-up making really bad decisions, then they move on to something else leaving the wreckage behind.
Off topic comment: I was in the UK when 9-11 happened. As I was to leave the following day, I was stuck at the Gatwick Hilton with a Raytheon guy and had an additional 3 days or so because all the flights were cancelled. Raytheon and I would take the train in from Gatwick and go to a pub on Queens Gate in South Ken called Kavanaugh’s. We would be wearing jeans and trainers. Every time we walked in, patrons would look at us – ah, Americans? Let me buy you a pint! And we would sit there for hours talking about what had just happened. The hospitality was bar-none the best I’ve ever experienced. Mind you, we were in Central London so… these same guys were the ones running you over in the Tube station if you were even the least bit unsure! Really nice blokes during very unusual times. Our two countries really do share a lot of common values (although our common language doesn’t seem to be that common.)
Thanks again!