Irvine Sensors Contract: Irvine Sensors Corp. has...

Irvine Sensors Contract: Irvine Sensors Corp. has won a $490,000 contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to apply its memory chip technology to supercomputers.

Under a 13-month contract, the Costa Mesa computer electronics company will mount a stack of its memory chips on top of a processing chip. By doing that, memory and processing functions are linked on the supercomputer, giving it greater speed and efficiency, company officials said, and making it smaller and lighter than comparable systems.

The contract will “accelerate our timetable for widespread commercial use of our technology,” James Alexiou, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.

For 1991, Irvine Sensors reported a loss of about $400,000 on sales of $4.2 million.