High Throughput Wafer Scale Manufacturing of Custom Achromatic Infrared Meta Optics

The Department of Defense is seeking a cost-effective, high-throughput manufacturing process to produce wafer-scale achromatic meta-optic components tailored for mid-wave and long-wave infrared bands, addressing critical limitations in current meta-optic technology. While meta-optics offer transformative advantages by replacing bulky, multi-element infrared optics with compact, flat surfaces composed of subwavelength structures—enabling dramatic reductions in size, weight, and complexity for portable, UAV, and wearable IR systems—they are hindered by chromatic aberration and fabrication challenges. Existing methods for achieving broadband achromatic performance, such as stacked metalenses or phase dispersion engineering, rely on slow, expensive, and alignment-intensive techniques like electron beam or deep UV lithography, which are incompatible with scalable production and lack support for IR-optimized high-index materials. The goal is to develop a manufacturing process that leverages standard semiconductor infrastructure to enable wafer-scale fabrication with high throughput, minimal complexity, and compatibility with materials that transmit efficiently in the MWIR and LWIR ranges, unlocking advanced sensing and beam-shaping capabilities unachievable with conventional optics. This solicitation, titled High Throughput Wafer Scale Manufacturing of Custom Achromatic Infrared Meta Optics and issued under OSW26TZ05-NV003, is targeted exclusively at small businesses under the SBA’s Total Small Business Set-Aside, aligning with SBIR/STTR mandates for firms with fewer than 500 employees. The opportunity is open for proposals from August 5 to August 26, 2026, with performance expected to advance the state of the art in infrared optics manufacturing by overcoming current bottlenecks in scalability, cost, material selection, and spectral bandwidth. Success will enable the Army and broader defense systems to deploy next-generation IR platforms with unprecedented form-factor efficiency and multi-dimensional signal processing capabilities, such as simultaneous polarization and wavelength discrimination, across critical infrared bands without the weight and volume penalties of traditional optical systems.