All right, everyone. Let's go ahead and welcome our next presenter, Erich Manz with Kopin Corporation.
Thank you very much. My name is Erich Manz. I am the CFO of Kopin Corporation. I've been the CFO now for about nine months. Yeah, the story's a little bit new to me. Show of hands from a participant standpoint, how many people are familiar with the Kopin story, the long history of it, and how many people are here because they're interested in what we're doing today? Long history of Kopin. Anybody know about that? Okay, I'll spend a little bit of time on it then, and then the new technologies and things that we're looking at getting interested in. The long story of Kopin, and I'll have you guys read every word on this while I talk about the long story of Kopin.
The long story of Kopin was it was a founder-run business. The founder was an MIT grad by the name of John Fan. Developed some fascinating technologies, eventually ended up developing microdisplay technologies that were used in several different applications. As an engineer-founder, his objective was to create the greatest technology out there, get people to fund that development, and if eventually he could get it to commercial success, that was a great story for him. Had some successes early on, but over the years, just never developed into a company that was profitable, scalable, and was in markets that probably were outpaced by the competition. A little bit just about Kopin's history here. Some of the technology that was developed really allowed us to play in spaces that were military-based in nature.
Sometimes in the military applications, it's not about the price point, it's about getting the best technology that is available on the market today. That's become a foundation of Kopin Corporation. It is our core business. When you look at the microdisplays, which is the main thing we'll talk about, there are several different microdisplays. Many companies deal with one or two of them. We have 4 different types of microdisplays that have developed and are operating with today. We have a very good customer base. Our tier 1 customer base, primarily in the defense industry, has been with us for many, many years and is currently a strong foundation for us to build on other opportunities. You can see some of the things here.
We talk about proprietary microdisplay portfolio, market opportunities that are growing, tier 1 customer base, which is strong, and on our new AI GPU interconnect strategy, that's probably something that is bringing most people here to really talk about what the next phase is for Kopin, and we'll get into that in a little bit more detail. Kopin, three small facilities. The Westborough one, top left-hand, that's the headquarters. That is the main manufacturing site. It's about 74,000 sq ft. We've got about 140 people there. Reston, Virginia, down in the lower left, that group is just a small portion of that building. Really a handful of people there doing some of our medical devices and some of our helmet systems, fully integrated microdisplay optics and the system itself.
Dalgety Bay, Scotland, really a location that is underutilized, but with a new investment from one of our partner organizations, we expect to build out that facility and grow our infrastructure with the NATO forces there that our strategic partner is involved with. Tier 1 customer base, Collins Aerospace, Theon, Zeiss, General Dynamics, Leonardo DRS, Lockheed Martin, U.S. Army and the Navy, all partner organizations with us. We sell into these organizations. These are the tier 1 suppliers to the U.S. military apparatus. Excuse me. Recent strategic investments and partners. Theon, I mentioned briefly. Unusual Machines, Andes, and now Fabric AI. Excuse me. These are all organizations that are strategic to the ongoing business and the future state of Kopin. We talk about microdisplays.
Microdisplays are envision your TV screen on your wall at home and shrinking that down to something the size of your fingernail, and there are many different applications for that. Many cases that you might be thinking about would be looking at that tiny microdisplay in front of your eye or in a glasses system or augmented reality, whatever it might be. Our applications, I'll go into that in a few minutes, are just a little bit different than that, and it's worth noting. Each one of these technologies, for a different reason, has a different application and a different purpose, and some of them are good for different reasons. The one main thing that we talk about when we talk about the microdisplays is the level of brightness and some of the other aspects, whether it be pros or cons, in terms of what each of them does.
When you look at the notation on the bottom, one nit, we talk about a one candela of brightness. The first microdisplays, which are LCDs. It's 2,000-5,000 nits of brightness. It's a low-cost technology. It's very mature manufacturing cycle. They've been around for a long time. In some cases, they are very good. They're very low in response speeds and low contrast. They always need backlighting, and there's no true black. In other applications, they are not actually that good. The OLED microdisplays, those are 10,000-25,000 nits of brightness. To put this into some perspective, down the bottom, your cell phone or watch is about 1,000-2,000 nits of brightness. These are significantly brighter than that. They do have certain applications which are really good.
Some of the higher daylight applications, they actually lose some of the visibility of what you're trying to present. You have to drive them to about their peak brightness. With that, because they're organic, they deplete over time. In a military application, sometimes these only last 72-100 hours, which in a military application, you're throwing these things out after that long. It's not actually great for us. The latest technology, the technology that we've developed, a monochrome MicroLED, is the latest and greatest. That's the MicroLED technology. You can see there the difference in brightness, the 1.8 million-6.2 million nits of brightness.
That's important in daylight situations, which is now what the military base is asking us to do, is provide something that not only works at night when you have night vision or thermal vision and you can display something in low-light applications, but now provide that level of telemetry to the user in a daylight situation. You can still see what's going on in your environment around you, but you're getting the information from whatever source it might be into your display as a soldier on the ground during the day. One of the areas that makes Kopin rather unique, there are a lot of microdisplay competitors out there. They will sell you the microdisplays, and that's what they do. We actually provide a fully integrated system, if that's what our customers want, or a partially integrated system, depending on their needs.
If you look, we've got the microdisplays. We are heavily engaged in optics. The complete assemblies on the far right, that basically is everything from the microdisplay to the optic to the package delivered to the customer. That's a rather unique thing for Kopin to be doing. We do most of that in our Westborough facility right now with some of our main military-based customers. This is just another view of the applications. These are all fully integrated. This is microdisplay, optics, and full production unit, whether it be binoculars, heads-up displays, weapon sights, or in the final case, the bottom right-hand side is medical devices, which is a small but growing business for us. Microdisplays themselves. Again, we talked about what people might be thinking of the microdisplays. On the left-hand side of this, we have the things that Kopin is not addressing.
We are not addressing the small displays that you might be actually looking at the display, which is at the top left, the watch displays, which you're actually, again, looking at a projection of that microdisplay, or on the bottom left, the actual augmented reality or virtual reality, AR/VR-type systems. What we're doing is we're looking at an application where we are using some type of a waveguide or display to take the information from the microdisplay, present it in front of the user so that they are also looking at what their environment is doing. If you've all seen "Top Gun," some of those pictures up there look fairly familiar to you. You see the green telemetry that is in front of the pilot's head.
They're actually flying the airplane, but they can also see that there is a direction coordinate, an altitude, whatever it might be that they need to see. Some of the other telemetry that you see, it's all listed here in terms of enemy, friend, foe, direction, space, which way to travel, whatever it might be that the soldier actually needs. These are the types of things that we focus on. The bottom picture on the right-hand side is actually now looking at what that would look like in a daytime setting. That's where that brightness situation comes in, where you need that to be extremely bright. Right now, what you're looking at there is a monochrome version.
We have a contract right now, and we'll get into that in a bit, in terms of developing a color MicroLED that would be available for the military in the use for a daytime application. These are growth opportunities that we look at now. Again, we have a good foundational business with our military customers. It's about 60%-70% of our business. Some of these are actually still military applications, some are not. At the end of last year, if you listen to our earnings calls, we were a little bit disappointed just in our earnings because of the government shutdown. We didn't lose any programs, but what we did lose is we lost orders.
Ongoing programs that we had a long trajectory ahead of us out to 2030 in some cases, we just weren't getting purchase orders for the next order because there was no one in the government to actually sign off and say, "Yes, this is approved." We knew the demand was there. We just didn't know when those orders were coming. That was a little bit of slip for us last year. We thought exiting the year that those were going to come in stronger than we anticipated, and we were pleased to find out that they actually did. We got a couple of different orders back-to-back that were actually a stronger signal than we had actually anticipated. The middle section there, which is a DarkWAVE product.
This is something that we're working on with our partner company, Theon, which is basically a company that kind of owns the military base in NATO in terms of their display systems. They have a large footprint there. It was a market that we couldn't penetrate on our own. This investment, they needed a facility to build this and develop it with us. It was a perfect opportunity for us to address a market that we couldn't address on our own. We are developing what is basically the front side of that binocular that you see. I'll go into that in a little bit more detail later, but that's called a DarkWAVE system. Again, this is looking at bringing telemetry into a system that would normally just be a night vision or a thermal vision goggle. That's all that it can do.
Not that that's not impressive, now you add in some of the other information from another source and make that goggle system actually intelligent. Top right-hand side, this is an IBAS program. You may have seen that we were awarded a $15.4 million contract to develop and onshore a color MicroLED for the U.S. Army. The reason that's important is because the U.S. Army is going to be contracting with one or two or several suppliers of the helmet system, the next helmet system under an SBMC award program, which is the Soldier Borne Mission Command.
What they've done is they've come to Kopin and said, "We need you to build the microdisplay for the spec that we're going to tell all these other suppliers they need to use, no matter which program or which supplier they choose." There's a few of them that are in the running right now. We do have relationships with them, but really what it's going to come down to is the spec for that program will be delivered by Kopin. Bottom left-hand side, medical device business. We have a couple OEM customers that are buying this from us right now. It's been a slow adoption rate, but it's growing business for us. It's good margin business for us. That is a fully integrated system that is being used right now to perform surgeries throughout the world. It's a good program for us.
It was a great use of the complete technology system that we deploy. Bottom middle, first-person viewer, drone market. I'm sure you all are aware of the drone market opportunities right now that exist, just because the way that wars are being fought. Drone technology is here, it's here to stay. We are not in the drones. The drones are going to be manufactured by somebody else. What we are in is the first-person viewer. That basically says that you're getting information from one drone, many drones, or you actually might be flying or piloting that drone using a system that we have developed here.
What we're trying to do with that system is we're trying to develop a module that one or many customers can buy, rather than try to create a very bespoke one-off edition that maybe one or two would buy, and then you have to create another one. It gets very expensive to do that. We're looking to make our manufacturing process much more strategic in terms of making something that many will buy. It's important to us. The last thing on here, probably the one that is the most important or the most interesting for people that are looking at Kopin as something that might be a little bit different than it had been for many, many years, and that's on our AI infrastructure. We were already developing our color MicroLED for the Army, and that was something that we think is bright enough to actually transmit data.
When we look at this system and we have two MicroLEDs across from one another, one is a transmitter, one is a receiver, you can actually send data across that system, across those two platforms without the generation of heat or as much heat as a current infrastructure right now. You can also do it at a pace that is as fast as the GPUs that are actually creating or computing the data. We're solving two problems with that. It's a market that everybody is after right now. We have some competitors in the market. We have everybody chasing that. We're getting a lot of inbound phone calls on whether we can do this. Should we do this? What are the options? It is brand new to a lot of people, but it is gaining a lot of traction and a lot of attention right now.
The reason that I have that ugly little eyeball down in the far side of that picture is because this is technology that Kopin developed over two years ago. It was a NeuralDisplay technology, which takes a microdisplay, and it takes one of the pixels in that microdisplay, and it turns it back and looks at the eye. You can see which direction the eye is going, and you can see if your pupil is dilated, not dilated. That is technology that basically says we already know at Kopin that we can transmit and collect data. That is a step well ahead of our competition in this AI infrastructure space. I'm just going to go into a little bit more detail about each one of those growth areas that I had mentioned.
I think it's important to note some of these programs that we have are already in place. They're already things that we've won awards or are getting awards, or we have a view into a very established base. Some of those are on the pilot helmets, heads-up displays, rotary aircraft displays, some of the family of weapon sights, which is basically saying you're on a gun or military application that you can see through a microdisplay, either a further target, or you can see something is generated through thermal or night vision technology. Some of the other things that are on the right-hand side of this are applications that we are in, but they have not been awarded to the prime. We talk about it just because it's good technology, it's been deployed, we have the partnerships.
We just don't know if these things are going to take place because we're not in control of those awards. That might be in the Abrams tank replacement, it could be in the Stinger missile programs. These are things that we already have the application there. Our customers are already satisfied with the product. It's been tested, it's been developed. We could manufacture today if they get the award, but we're a little reluctant to say that we have that as ongoing business just because we don't control when they get those awards. Theon, again, this is our partner company that invested in us, and one of the things that they wanted us to do is develop a technology that's on the top right-hand side of the screen, which we're calling a DarkWAVE product.
The DarkWAVE product, what that does is it takes the technology that is already in the binoculars, which you see on the top left and bottom right, and it actually adds intelligence to that set of binoculars. If this company wanted to sell that set of binoculars for $5,000-$10,000 as a thermal or night vision binocular set, they can do that. They can also sell a different set that contains all the technology, that has all the telemetry integrated into the binocular set. That is about a $60,000-$70,000 set of binoculars.
What Kopin is doing with them right now is creating an attachment piece, which you see there, that would go onto their existing goggle set, and it provides all the telemetry that they would need from whatever source into that set of binoculars that is either already in the market, already being deployed, or is part of a $1 billion award that they got from NATO to go produce those goggles. This is something that we are developing with them and for them. The great thing about that, again, we're trying to do something that is manufactured for a one to many customer base. The only thing that you would need to change on that, the microdisplay is the same, the waveguide is the same. The little ring that attaches to the binocular itself would be different for any customer.
Now you're making one product, you're making one small change to it, and now you can sell to many customers. It's a big change in our product life cycle right now, where we do a lot of one-off development and manufacturing for our customers. Again, we talked about this IBAS award. The IBAS award, if you look down below, there are many different individual companies that are vying for the Soldier Borne Mission Command award. Some of them will be successful. Military choices usually take one, two, three, several, and award them the contract so that they have an overlap if there's any production issues with any single supplier. Our objective here is to be in as many of those as we can. Again, the military came to us to develop this technology. This is a huge market.
As you can see there, it's over a billion-dollar SAM and Army applications. You can see the numbers there on why that adds up to a fairly significant opportunity for Kopin itself. Over a seven-year timeframe, we're looking at this being somewhere between $300 and $500 million for Kopin, just in the displays. Some of the things that we talked about here, medical headsets, top left, that's something, again, it's good margin business. It's growing business. The adoption rate is slower than we expect. We do have a new version of this coming out, which is wireless. You can see this is a wired version. Again, this is a much lighter system than what the doctors might be looking or using now. It prevents them from having to look up into a screen away from them.
They can just glance up at a screen that's right above their eyes and see what the medical devices inside the body are actually doing. Sentinel FPV, again, this is the first-person viewer drone market, and this is us actually creating a device where similar to the doctor looking at a screen that's right above their eyes, the user of the first person of the drone, who's actually either flying the drone or getting information from the drone, can glance up at what is in front of them in that display, but can also interact with their environment. It's a little bit different than some of the systems that you see down below on the lower right, which is basically a fully occluded system.
If you've ever used an Apple gaming system or an Oculus system or some of those other systems that are out there available in the market today, they're fun. They're comfortable to wear for a little while. After wearing them for an hour or so, you might not feel great. You might bump into some furniture. Our device here is something that allows you to interact with your environment. You can do things. You can walk around. You can pick up things. You can use your hands. If you're in the field, you could fire a weapon and still get all the information you need from the drones that are out there. That's a very exciting opportunity for us. We have the first award from one of the top five finalists in the Drone Dominance Competition. If you're unfamiliar with what that is, I got one minute yet, sorry.
Drone Dominance Competition, there's 43 different drone manufacturers that are vying for government contracts. They go through a gauntlet of flying their drones, doing different maneuvers, actually, the government will then select five, six, seven, 10 to move on to the next segment. The volume of business is significant. We are in development with one drone manufacturer, and we have connections with several others that are alluding to some very high volumes of business that we're looking at possibly coming on as early as next year. We talked a little bit about the AR/AI optical interconnects. Certainly business that could outpace just about everything else that we're doing right now at Kopin. This is really significant. It's happening fast. This is something that we cannot miss this opportunity as a growth opportunity for Kopin. With that, I will end my stated time.
Do we have time for questions, or I went through it all? I'm sorry. Certainly pay attention to the story. It's very exciting for us. That's it. Thank you very much.