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11.07
Washington
Technology Digest
Compiled
By IEEE-USA Staff
The following is a recap of new
and notable developments in electrical
engineering and computer or information
technology emerging from the federal government
in October and November.
DEFENSE CONFERENCE EXPLORES
RESPONSES TO IED THREAT
Participants from industry,
academia, the national laboratories and the
military gathered at the University of Maryland
on 29-30 October to come up with better ways to
thwart Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDS).
According to Defense Department officials, IEDs
have caused nearly half of all casualties in
Iraq and nearly 30 percent of those in
Afghanistan since the start of combat
operations.
Retired Army Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, director
of DOD’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device
Defeat Organization, thanked the roughly 750
participants for technological advances they’ve
helped develop, particularly in the intelligence
and training realms. What’s needed now, he said,
are better technologies — so troops can identify IEDs sooner, before they inflict damage.
The conference promoted
information sharing which DOD hopes will
generate plausible solutions, reduce redundancy
of effort, and help weed out initiatives that
have been tried already. According to Robin L. Keesee, deputy director of the Joint IED Defeat
Organization, JIEDDO’s past two industry
conferences yielded better-quality, more-focused
technological proposals, many within the first
week of the session.
According to Keesee, “Speed is
critical in an environment where insurgents,
unrestricted by any formal hierarchy, are able
to quickly alter their tactics, techniques and
procedures.” He added, “They are watching what
works and doesn’t in a neighborhood and are
adapting on that basis. Our soldiers and Marines
and others are adapting their tactics and
techniques at that level. The challenge for us
is, how do we adapt the technology as well to
support the Marines and soldiers?”
JIEDDO has been able to reduce
the time to get funding approval for a new idea
to as little as three weeks. That’s the time it
takes to run the idea through a panel of
scientists and engineers who verify it makes
operational sense, military experts to ensure it
makes tactical and operational sense, and
service-level and Defense Department levels to
agree it makes investment sense.
For more information, see:
www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=47975
ARMY PLANS MASSIVE
COMMAND/CONTROL SIMULATION
The Army's
Communications-Electronics Research,
Development, and Engineering Center (CERDEC) is
executing the largest future force Command,
Control, Communication, Computers, Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) and
networking demonstration to date. The
demonstration incorporates more than 100 live
communications, sensor and battle command
systems complemented by a brigade-sized element
represented in virtual and constructive
simulation.
For more information, see:
www.federallabs.org/news/top-stories/articles/?pt=top-stories/articles/0907-05.jsp
NIST DEMOS FABRICATION OF
INDUSTRIAL-GRADE NANOWIRE DEVICES
In the growing catalog of
nanoscale technologies, nanowires — tiny
rows of conductor or semiconductor atoms — have
attracted a great deal of interest for their
potential to build unique atomic-scale
electronics. But before you can buy some at your
local Nano Depot, manufacturers will need
efficient, reliable methods to build them in
quantity. Researchers at the National Institute
of Standards and Technology (NIST) believe they
have one solution — a technique that allows them
to selectively grow nanowires on sapphire wafers
in specific positions and orientations
accurately enough to attach contacts and layer
other circuit elements, all with conventional
lithography techniques.
Building on earlier work to grow
nanowires horizontally on the surface of wafers,
NIST researchers used conventional semiconductor
manufacturing techniques to deposit small
amounts of gold in precise locations on a
sapphire wafer. In a high-temperature process,
the gold deposits bead up into nanodroplets that
act as nucleation points for crystals of zinc
oxide, a semiconductor. A slight mismatch in the
crystal structures of zinc oxide and sapphire
induces the semiconductor to grow as a narrow
nanowire in one particular direction across the
wafer. Because the starting points and the
growth direction are both well known, it is
relatively straightforward to add electrical
contacts and other features with additional
lithography steps. As proof of concept, the NIST
researchers have used this procedure to create
more than 600 nanowire-based transistors, a
circuit element commonly used in digital memory
chips, in a single process.
The research results are
reported in A B. Nikoobakht. Toward
industrial-scale fabrication of nanowire-based
devices. Chem. Mater., ASAP Article
10.1021/cm071798p S0897-4756(07)01798-X. Web
Release Date: October 9, 2007.
JUMBO JET-SIZED BALLOON
CARRIES SOLAR TELESCOPE TO 120,000 FEET
In October, the National Center
for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder,
Colo., and a team of research partners
successfully launched a solar telescope to an
altitude of 120,000 feet, borne by a balloon
larger than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. The test
clears the way for long-duration polar balloon
flights, beginning in 2009, that will capture
unprecedented details of the sun's surface.
"This unique research project
will enable us to view features of the sun that
we've never seen before," said Michael Knölker,
director of NCAR's High Altitude Observatory and
a principal investigator on the project. "We
hope to unlock important mysteries about the
Sun's magnetic field structures, which at times
can cause electromagnetic storms in our upper
atmosphere and may have an impact on Earth's
climate."
Known as Sunrise,
the project is an international collaboration involving NCAR,
NASA, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System
Research in Germany, the Kiepenheuer Institute
for Solar Physics in Germany, the Astrophysics
Institute of the Canary Islands in Spain, and the
Swedish Space Corporation. Additional U.S.
partners include the Lockheed Martin Corporation
and the University of Chicago.
Funding for NCAR's work on the project comes
from NASA and from the National Science
Foundation (NSF), NCAR's primary sponsor.
PRINCETON SEMICONDUCTOR
RESEARCH BENDS LIGHT “WRONG WAY” WITH POTENTIAL
FOR NEW APPLICATIONS
A National Science
Foundation-funded Princeton University-led
research team has created an easy-to-produce
material from the stuff of computer chips that
has the rare ability to bend light in the
opposite direction from all naturally occurring
materials. This startling property may
contribute to significant advances in many
areas, including high-speed communications,
medical diagnostics, and detection of terrorist
threats.
The new substance is in a
relatively new class of materials called "metamaterials,"
which are made out of traditional substances,
such as metals or semiconductors, arranged in
very small alternating patterns that modify
their collective properties. This approach
enables metamaterials to manipulate light in
ways that cannot be accomplished by normal
materials. Previous metamaterials were
two-dimensional arrangements of metals, which
limited their usefulness. The Princeton
invention is the first three-dimensional
metamaterial constructed entirely from
semiconductors, the principal ingredient of
microchips and optoelectronics.
"To be useful in a variety of
devices, metamaterials need to be
three-dimensional," said Princeton electrical
engineering professor Claire Gmachl, one of the
researchers on the study. "Furthermore, this is
made from semiconductors, which are extremely
functional materials. These are the things from
which true applications are made."
For more information, see:
www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S19/21/37O65/
ARGONNE NATIONAL LAB ACQUIRES FIRST SICORTEX
SC5832
On 16 Oct., SiCortex, the first
company to engineer a Linux cluster from the
silicon up, announced that the first production
model of an SC5832, its flagship 5.8 teraflop
system, will be installed at the U.S. Department
of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. The lab
and its community of researchers will take
advantage of the unique capabilities and energy
efficiencies of the SC5832 to conduct research
in a variety of areas, including astrophysics,
climate modeling, oil and gas exploration,
seismic research and biotechnology.
For more information, see:
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-10/dnl-anl101507.php
DOE REPORT HIGHLIGHTS
PROGRESS IN DEPLOYING SCIENTIFIC FACILITIES AND
INSTRUMENTS
On 11 Oct., the U.S. Department
of Energy’s Office of Science released a
comprehensive update of its landmark 2003
publication, “Facilities for the Future of
Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook,” The report
notes that DOE has made “significant progress”
in deploying the scientific facilities and
instruments that the United States needs to
capture world scientific leadership, extend the
frontiers of science and support the
Department’s missions.
When it was published four years
ago, the Facilities Outlook was the first
long-range facilities plan prioritized across
disciplines ever issued by a government science-funding agency anywhere in the world. The 2003
plan listed 28 new scientific facilities and
upgrades of current facilities deemed essential
over the next 20 years in all fields of science
supported by the Office of Science, including
fusion energy, advanced scientific computation,
materials science, biological and environmental
science, high energy physics and nuclear
physics. The facilities were ranked according to
their scientific importance and readiness for
construction, and they spanned scientific fields
to ensure the United States retains its primacy in
critical areas of science and technology well
into this century.
The new Interim Report provides
a summary update on the status of the original
28 facilities and features three charts. One
lists the 28 facilities as of the original
November 2003 publication, including their R&D,
conceptual design, engineering design,
construction, and operation status at that time.
The other two charts show the updated list of
facilities and their projected status,
respectively, by the conclusion of the 2007
fiscal year, which ended 30 September 2007, and
by the conclusion of the 2008 fiscal year,
ending 30 September 2008.
Both the original Facilities
Outlook and the new Interim Report are available
online at:
www.science.doe.gov/about/Future/Facilities%20for%20the%20Future%20of%20Science.htm.
RESEARCH TO EXPLORE
GROUND-BREAKING TECHNOLOGIES FOR HEALTH CARE
In early October, the National
Institute of Biomedical Imaging and
Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National
Institutes of Health (NIH), announced the award
of more than $12 million in grants to support
research and development of potentially
high-impact, innovative technologies to advance
health care. The new grants will fund four
investigators in developing groundbreaking
technologies: disposable microchips for the
diagnosis of metastatic lung cancer, a
bio-artificial kidney to eliminate dialysis
procedures, insulin-producing cells to treat
diabetes, and nanoparticles that selectively
leave the blood and bind to cancer cells to
assist in removal of brain tumors.
“This innovative program from
the NIBIB promises to harness the power of
technological discovery and team science to
translate new knowledge into practical
healthcare benefits for our nation,” said Elias
A. Zerhouni, M.D., NIH director.
For more information, see:
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-10/niob-nii100407.php
DHS FUNDS DEMONSTRATIONS OF
STAND-OFF RADIATION DETECTOR SYSTEMS (SORDS)
The U.S. Department of Homeland
Security’s (DHS) Domestic Nuclear Detection
Office (DNDO) has awarded three contracts for
demonstrations of Stand-Off Radiation Detection
Systems (SORDS) to General Electric Global
Research of Niskayuna, N.Y.; Science
Applications International Corporation of San
Diego, Calif.; and the Naval Research Laboratory
of Washington, D.C. The contracts were valued at
approximately $33 million.
The goal of the SORDS program is
to develop advanced nuclear detectors that
demonstrate the ability to autonomously
determine the type and location of radiation
sources at much greater distances than current
technology.
“The SORDS approach, if
validated, could be used in a wide range of
monitoring applications including border
crossings, sea lanes and air surveillance,” said
Vayl S. Oxford, director of the Domestic Nuclear
Detection Office. “This program could create a
significant increase in capability for
monitoring the illicit movement of radiation
sources.”
For more information, see:
www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1191270633797.shtm
Comments may
be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.
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