Partnership with Northwestern University on Project GLACIER
Infrared cameras used for space missions work best when they are cold. Very cold. The sensor sits inside a vacuum flask, chilled by a cryocooler, because heat is the enemy of a clean infrared image.
That creates an awkward problem. The sensor produces an enormous amount of data, and all of it has to travel out of the cold box to the electronics outside. Today that data travels over copper wire, and copper wire costs power twice over. It costs power in the circuit that pushes the signal down the wire, and it costs power again in the cryocooler, which now has to remove both the heat from that circuit and the heat leaking in along the wire itself. On a battery powered or satellite mounted system, that is time on station you do not get back.
For a large modern sensor, moving the data can consume as much power as the cooling budget can spare. The bottleneck is no longer the detector. It is the wire.
Project GLACIER is Dreamscape Systems' answer to that problem. The idea is to send the data out on light instead of electricity. Optical fiber carries far more data than copper and conducts almost no heat, so both halves of the power penalty shrink at once. This also fits into previous work we have been doing with Project BLUEBIRD and the GATE Program to read information from optical/spin systems.
Sending light out of a cold box is not itself new. What has been missing is doing it in a way that actually saves power. Earlier attempts bolted an optical chip next to a standard readout chip and connected the two with conventional solder joints. That removed the copper, which helped with heat, but the circuit driving the signal was still built for copper. It still burned the same energy. The saving evaporated before it reached the optical device.
GLACIER takes the approach of designing the driver and the optical device together, so the driver only has to produce the small voltage the optical device needs, and the connection between them is short enough that it does not put the energy back. This first phase is a design and analysis effort. It produces the optical circuit design, a specification of the changes required to an existing readout chip, and a plan for building and testing the result.
Cold optical links matter beyond infrared imaging. Quantum computers face the same problem of getting data out of a refrigerator without heating it, and data centers are already moving to optical connections for similar reasons. Work in one area tends to help the others.
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