Seek Thermal won Best of Sensors 2022 for its Micro Core thermal sensor in the Optical and Cameras category, one of 14 categories awarded at Sensors Converge in June. The awards honor the best new products in the sensor ecosystem as well as the businesses and people that make these products a reality.
Micro Core wins on cost when compared to other products on a price per pixel basis. It was designed for lightweight, low power, and small form factor applications and delivers performance and accuracy, according to Seek Thermal.
“Micro Core is the result of years of research and development seeking to fully understand our customers’ needs and making the product easy to integrate and affordable,” said Sumitra Giri, senior product manager at Seek Thermal. “With our mission to make thermal imaging a part of everyday life, we aim to make it as simple as possible for any developer or organization to investigate the possibilities of using thermal imaging for their next generation product applications.”
Micro Core uses a shutterless design, which increases reliability by eliminating potentially troublesome mechanical shutters. Removing the shutter from the design also allows for uninterrupted thermal imaging.
Micro Core features a high pixel count. The thermal sensor has 200 X 150 resolution that delivers 30,000 temperature pixels for excellent image clarity and sensitivity. These are 12-micron pixels, which means more resolution and temperature data can be handled by a tiny physical array making it ideal for low-cost, small form factor devices. They are also dual-gain smart pixels. Every pixel can automatically adjust gain states to maximize resolution contrast when there are hot and cold objects in the same scene.
Seek Thermal also makes it easy for developers to use Micro Core right away. Micro Core starter kits come with Micro Core, a development board with a USB-C port, a USB-C to USB-A cable, and Developer Portal access. Seek Thermal's Developer Portal offers SDKs for software development, design documentation, pre-built examples to use as a starting point, access to support, community forums, and video tutorials.
Headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif., Seek Thermal was founded in 2012 by Bill Parrish, Ph.D., and Tim Fitzgibbons, Ph.D., to advance the state of thermal imaging technology. The company has partnered with Raytheon and NXP to build affordable high-quality thermal imaging sensors and provide them to the firefighting, law enforcement, and commercial markets at scale. In the last decade, Seek Thermal has shipped hundreds of thousands of products around the world.
For the complete list of finalists in the Best of Sensors 2022 Awards, check out this article