Crossing the Valley · 2026-05-13 · 26 min
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.
