Rebuilding America’s Thermal Imaging Supply Chain
About John Hong and Tallis Chang
John Hong is CEO and Tallis Chang is COO of Obsidian Sensors. The two have worked together for over 40 years, with backgrounds in aerospace before joining Qualcomm. At Qualcomm, they were part of the team that spent nearly a decade developing low-power displays using MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) built on glass substrates. When Qualcomm decided the program no longer fit its core business, John and Tallis were given the runway to find a new application for the manufacturing know-how they had built. That pivot became Obsidian Sensors.
About Obsidian Sensors
Obsidian Sensors, headquartered in San Diego, manufactures microbolometers — the core sensor inside thermal imaging cameras — using a fundamentally different platform than the rest of the industry. Where incumbents builds them on silicon wafers, Obsidian builds these sensors on display glass, leveraging LCD fabrication infrastructure in Japan and Taiwan that already produces millions of phone and watch displays. This shift dramatically reduced unit cost while preserving sensor performance.
The company spun out of Qualcomm in 2017 with seed capital, transferred equipment, seven team members, and five patent applications. It initially targeted the automotive market before pivoting to defense after receiving a DIU OTA at the start of COVID. Today, Obsidian is a critical supplier of thermal cameras to the US drone ecosystem, with production scaling from 5,000 units in 2025 to a planned 1 million units per year by the end of 2026 at its Top Gun Street facility in San Diego. A Phase 2 facility targeting 10–20 million units annually is planned for 2028.
Key Takeaways
The structure of your spinout determines the trajectory of your company. Qualcomm transferred five patent applications outright to Obsidian in exchange for equity, not royalties. That clean structure made it possible to raise from outside investors later without a strategic acquirer’s claims hanging over the cap table. These favorable IP terms gave the company a viable path, where it otherwise may have been stuck on the launchpad.
The market that funds you may not be the market that scales you. Obsidian was built for automotive, and automotive remains part of the long-term plan because of its volume profile. But automotive qualification cycles are too slow to validate a startup. The DIU OTA that arrived during COVID gave Obsidian working capital, a reason to stay operational during shutdowns, and a proof point they could carry into the rest of defense.
Cost transformation often comes from changing the manufacturing platform, not the product. Thermal imaging has been a defense-critical capability for 50 years, but the cost curve plateaued because the industry kept building on silicon. Obsidian’s insight was that the sensor problem could be moved entirely onto LCD glass, which meant the fabs already existed at scale and could run microbolometers alongside their normal display production.
Build the IP wall before the imitators arrive. Obsidian has 40+ patents granted and roughly 80 more pending, and their tech transfer to fab partners happens under export license. John mentioned the inbound interest from “weird emails” with “strange English grammar” almost in passing, because the legal infrastructure to handle that interest was already in place. Especially for hardware companies with defense applications, the IP architecture is a core part of the product. It cannot be retrofitted under pressure.
This is a crucible moment for American supply chains. Obsidian is building Phase 1 for 1 million units a year while current orders are at 5,000, and Phase 2 for 10–20 million while Phase 1 isn’t yet complete. The bet is that demand signals from customers walking into their facility are stronger than any forecast a procurement office will publish. Even without signed deals, the trends are clear: make it here in the US, at scale, as fast as possible. That’s a function of newfound clarity from the Department of War and the US government focusing much more attention and capital on domestic supply chains. And that’s pretty darn exciting.
Follow John: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-h-973b372/
Follow Tallis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tallischang/
Learn more about Obsidian: https://www.obsidiansensors.com/
Follow Noah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahsheinbaum/
