In an effort to get suppliers of millimeter wave security sensors and potential government buyers on the same page, industry officials from companies in the U.S. and the United Kingdom have begun meeting with government officials from U.S. and European security agencies to better understand what the governments’ needs are and what capabilities industry can offer.

At the behest of industry, the collaborative effort is being coordinated by the International Wireless Industry Consortium (IWPC), which uses “highly focused workshops” to bring together the various suppliers and customers that make up the supply chain for high frequency electronics, Don Brown, director and founder of the IWPC, tells TR2.

“The mission of the IWPC is to do everything possible to facilitate that communication up and down the supply chain,” Brown says.

For the millimeter wave security sensor effort, a series of meetings begun two years ago led to the recent creation of a “benchmarking project” to more closely align the interests of the government agencies with what industry can or could offer.

The goal of the benchmarking project “is to create one or a series of documents…which will as clearly as possible describe the needs requirements of the agencies for a variety of applications [such as] airport security, port security, transportation security, critical infrastructure security, a long list of applications, and the requirements for those applications, and the capabilities of equipment, and to try and make sure there is as close a match as possible,” Brown says.

The first meeting hosted by the IWPC on millimeter wave security sensors was held in Reading, U.K., in October 2005, and included industry participants and security officials from the U.K. Some of the industry sponsors included Britain’s BAE SYSTEMS and QinetiQ, Northrop Grumman [NOC], Raytheon [RTN], and Xytrans. At that meeting it was obvious that industry and government officials “were talking past each other,” Brown says.

“You had all these equipment guys doing tremendous technology development but didn’t really understand what the needs were of the end user,” he says. “In this case the U.K. Home Office.”

That meeting led to one in Northern Virginia the following September that included U.S. government speakers from the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the National Institute of Justice, the Defense Department, as well as Canadian and U.K. security officials. The purpose of this meeting was for the government officials to describe their requirements in as much detail as possible, Brown says.

Then several months later, in February 2007, a follow-up meeting was also held in Northern Virginia to have the equipment suppliers say what they could provide based on what the government agencies said they wanted, Brown says.

“What came out of that meeting was, clearly that there was a miscommunication between what the agencies wanted and what the equipment buyers were doing,” Brown says. “The agency guys said, ‘we want A, B and C,’ and the equipment guys were saying, ‘we can deliver D, E and F.'”

Benchmark Project

After the February meeting earlier this year, there was a desire on the part of the millimeter wave industry and the government agencies to work more closely in order to better understand each other in terms of capabilities and needs, Young says. That led to the formation of the Benchmark Document Development Project.

Prior to the first benchmarking working group meeting last month, which was held in the U.K., Brown met officials from DHS S&T and TSA to better understanding their hopes for the Benchmark Document Development Project.

Using a Venn diagram as an example, Brown says there is only a small intersection between two circles, one of which represents DHS requirements and the other representing industry capabilities.

“The agencies are hoping that by engaging with the IWPC and its members, that they’ll be able in the not too distant future to have those two circles intersect almost completely,” Brown says.

Brown points out that the goal of the benchmarking meetings is not to create standards for millimeter wave security sensors. Possibly in the future the product or products of the Benchmark Document Development Project could form the foundation of a standard.

Creating standards typically takes two to three years and with rapid advances in millimeter wave and terahertz technology occurring, any standard would be obsolete by the time it is issued, Brown says. Under the project, the participants hope to have the first version of a document covering selected security applications ready early next year. Next April the IWPC plans to have another workshop with industry and government officials that might discuss things like perimeter or proximity sensor systems, he says.

The project is tackling two different types of millimeter wave and terahertz systems, equipment for stand-off detection and sensors used to screen persons at a fixed point and what are the issues associated with both approaches. The first is for screening personnel at a checkpoint where the person is expected to cooperate. These would be walk-through or walk-by systems. The second type is for non-cooperative persons such as a suicide bomber where it is desired to detect threats at a distance, Brown says.

For example, Brown says, “When you’re inspecting someone at a distance and they’re carrying something innocuous, it’s difficult to know what a bad thing is and what an okay thing is. We’re getting into some of these details and you can imagine how complicated this gets.”

As the IWPC led project gets underway, TSA recently has recently begun to show a greater interest in examining the use of millimeter wave sensors in different sectors of transportation security. The agency has awarded QinetiQ a potential $17.4 million indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract for the company’s SPO-7 passive millimeter wave stand off detectors for pilot programs in a variety of settings such as ferries, airport lobbies, train stations, bus stations and others.

The initial task order to QinetiQ is for $3 million for 12 SPO-7s. The ID/IQ contract has two years for system acquisition and five option years for maintenance. Earlier this year TSA pilot tested QinetiQ’s SPO-20, a larger detection system than the SPO-7, at the Staten Island Ferry in New York, the Cape May, N.J. side of the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, and Union Station in Washington, D.C.

TSA is also now pilot testing for the first time a walk through active millimeter-wave portal at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Ariz. The ProVision system is being supplied by L-3 Communications [LLL] and will be used for secondary screening at the security checkpoint. In this case the millimeter wave whole body imaging system is being compared against the performance of backscatter whole body imaging systems. TSA is buying eight ProVision portals for $1.7 million. The agency also plans additional pilot tests at two more airports.