Among the chief technological challenges of these projects are to build electronic and electro-optical sensors able to withstand the severe conditions of the arctic, as well as advanced battery technologies, to enable these sensors to operate unattended for a month or more at a time.

POET technology would be well suited in this application and has already been in space, I can not think of any harsher environment. With the advatages of up to 90% application power savings over silicon, a one chip solution with integrated analog, digital and optical on one chip.

http://www.poet-technologies.com/markets/

The POET platform is flexible, and can be applied to virtually any technical application, including processors, SoCs, memory, digital/mobile, sensor/laser and electro-optical, among many others.

POET has seen early traction in two specific markets:

• Commercial – Progress in the commercial electronics industry over the past four decades has both driven and been driven by the industry’s ability to create and serve markets with faster, cheaper, and smaller monolithic integrated circuits. Each product advance in turn becomes the driver for the next wave of IC technology. Today however, this paradigm is falling short soon reaching physical limits. Particularly in the arenas of optoelectronics and very high-speed mixed-signal circuits, current silicon ICs will not suffice, and no good monolithic technology exists. POET is perfectly positioned to address this technology void thus advancing product offerings in PCs, communications and many consumer devices which have been historically powered by technology breakthroughs such as POET.

• Military – POET provides military and aerospace systems with integrated digital, radio frequency (RF), infrared (IR) and optical technologies in a single device. POET’s technology platform for optoelectronic integration exploits the optoelectronic and electronic behaviors of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) semiconductor material. One of the benefits of this material, from a space electronics perspective, is that GaAs is significantly less susceptible to x-ray and gamma-ray total integrated dose (TID) radiation. GaAs is the long-standing choice for high-frequency (e.g. RF) devices and circuits. Important to the military is POET’s ability to integrate digital, RF, and optical technologies in a single device and this makes POET an important, high-performance solution that satisfies documented needs for multiple space systems and all Military Departments and Agency Tech Areas.