This was a seedling design study for a DARPA program that never got funded. It leveraged POEMS and my antenna-coupled tunnel junction devices, adding a couple of novel wrinkles: metal-insulator-metal varactors and parametric readout using a 10 GHz pump frequency. Hopefully there will be a chance to revisit this, because it was potentially a pretty sweet solution.

For a large Far Eastern consumer electronics manufacturer to use in virtual reality games. A greatly improved transimpedance amplifier got them a factor of 10 in range (30 m vs. 3 m) for about the same amount of power.

Photon Budget and Optical Data Receiver
This one was a somewhat similar application for the Navy.

This was a collaboration with Chris Wieland of Della Enterprises on an Army Research contract.

The standard problem with conventional nanowatt photoreceivers is that in order to get near the shot noise, you have to use feedback resistors so gigantic that you can't maintain decent bandwidth.
This one has what I think is a completely novel photo-feedback architecture, i.e. rather than using a feedback resistor in the TIA, it uses two secondary photocurrents to cancel the input current. Putting the two secondary photodiodes in series makes the cancellation current 3 dB quieter than the shot noise, and a feedback system prevents them from fighting, as series-connected current sources normally would.