K Lab Corp. developing infrared display that could be used in Air Force simulations.
By: Charlie Olsen
In a small rented office space in an innocuous business complex in Hillsborough, one woman and her business may change the quality of the simulations that the Air Force uses to train its personnel.
Kaiyan Zhang, of Montgomery, is a physicist whose company, K Lab Corp., a subsidiary of InfoStat Inc. that specializes in laser coating, recently received a $50,000 grant to continue her research and development of an infrared display that could be used in Air Force simulations.
"Now they use a LCD [liquid crystal display] display, but there’s another kind of display that uses infrared," Dr. Zhang said. Using an infrared source, the simulation and the display could "generate a scene a background and a hotspot."
The hotspot could be a simulated jet engine or it could be other things, said Dr. Zhang, who has a doctorate in applied physics from the University of Michigan. It could simulate the heat signature of pretty much anything that has a temperature (and everything does).
"If we can simulate how it looks, they can simulate how to track it," said Dr. Zhang.
Although the specifics of how the display will work are still being nailed down, Dr. Zhang said it probably would be an extension of K Lab’s usual optical coating business.
Two doors into her office is a noisy room packed with electronics and work stations, with wires and hoses running throughout.
The biggest of the machines is an e-beam evaporator that noisily removes the air from its large cylindrical chamber. Once the air is removed, it fires an electron gun that evaporates the source material to coat a surface.
"They can apply to different materials and surfaces, like glass, crystal, semiconductors," Dr. Zhang said. "Depending on the different requirements, different coating recipes for materials and thickness are used."
For example, two-layer optical coating of two chemicals, such as tantalum pentoxide and silicone dioxide, can be applied on glass to make an anti-reflective coating of a certain wavelength of light.
Using this and other machines, Dr. Zhang creates optical thin film, photodiodes (light detectors) or lenses that can be used for telecommunication or industrial applications, such as high-speed fiber optic cable or industrial lasers.
Dr. Zhang said that research she is working on for the Air Force is still in its initial stages.
"We demonstrated single devices with very good performance and now working on the densed [multiple source] array," Dr. Zhang said. "With the additional funding from state, we plan to solve some packaging issue related to the array and optimize the single device performance, and hopefully roll out the first product from the project in a year’s frame."
K Lab Corp., located in the Hillsborough Park complex on Ilene Court, was formed in 2003, and InfoStat Inc., the parent company, was started in 1999 as a computer science and programming company. When Phase II funding begins, Dr. Zhang said, she hopes to expand her staff of three full-time employees.
Funding for the $50,000 grant comes from the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant program, which is designed to help companies sustain themselves throughout the funding gaps between Phase I and Phase II of the federal SBIR and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBTT) programs.
With the federal SBIR and SBTT programs, entrepreneurs can be awarded more than $850,000 over three years to develop new technology for the federal government.
"The commission recognizes how hard it can be for small companies to sustain themselves while they wait for the second phase of federal funding," said Commission Chairman Donald L. Drakeman in a press release. "This grant program helps bridge that funding gap and gives these companies the necessary support to reach the next level."
The grant to InfoStat was one of two awarded under the SBIR Bridge Grant program, for a total of $100,000. The other was to MaXentric Technologies LLC in Fort Lee.