In this effort we proposed to develop an integrated software environment for the rigorous electromagnetic analysis and design of diffractive optical elements (DOEs). To this end, we will develop a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) specificallygeared towards DOEs; we will refine, expand… More

A nearly universal trend in modern technology is the continued integration of systems, and their associated devices, on decreasingly smaller scales. While this has led to personal computers that offer more functionality and faster computational speeds, ithas also spurred the development of hybrid… More

"Advances in integrated circuit manufacturing techniques have allowed for the miniaturization of devices on rapidly decreasing scales. In the last decade, we have witnessed the emergence of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) from the laboratory to acommercially viable industry that is estimated… More

As the clock speeds of integrated circuits continue to increase, the technological limits of all-electrical interconnects are becoming the overwhelming limit to system performance. In particular, over 80% of the latency in current ICs is due tointerconnect limitations. Moreover, current processors… More

A nearly universal trend in modern technology is integrating systems, and their associated devices, on decreasingly smaller scales. Examples range from complete telecommunication systems on a chip to implantable medical devices smaller than human cells.The majority of these devices apply hybrid… More

In this effort we propose to develop an integrated analysis and design environment for the rigorous electromagnetic analysis and design of complex shipboard RF interactions for low frequencies (30MHz-2GHz). This integrated environment will include theability to predict the scattering and EMI… More

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 project addresses the market need for advances in commercial optical data storage technology. The demand for increased data capacity, higher performance, and the commercial success of products such as digital versatile disks (DVDs) is ever… More

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to accurately measure in vivo tendon forces would have a broad impact on assistive technologies as well as our scientific understanding of the human neuromuscular control system. Myoelectric prosthetics and functional electrical stimulation devices… More

Advances in fabrication technology have made it possible to prodce features that are smaller than the wavelength of light. As such a new class of optical devices based on submicron periodic structures has emerged and is referred to as photonic crystals (PhC) or photonic band gap devices (PBGs).… More

A nearly universal trend in modern technology is integrating systems, and their associated devices, on decreasingly smaller scales. Examples range from complete telecommunication systems on a chip to implantable medical devices smaller than human cells. The majority of these devices apply hybrid… More

In this proposal, we outline an approach for performing a complete electromagnetic analysis of electrical circuits in a fraction of the time that is currently possible. As clock rates increase, the need for such analysis grows. Current tools are inadequate to handle this burden. The computational… More

The rapid expansion in the electronics industry has given rise to what has become known as Moore's law. At its core, lies advances in lithography that enable the miniaturization of features patterned on semiconductor substrates. As the minimum feature patterned on modern integrated circuits… More

Pressure ulcers are a serious medical problem with annual treatment costs over $1 billion dollars. While the exact etiology involves a complex combination of factors, it is generally accepted that prolonged pressure to soft tissues results in discrete areas of acute ischemia. If the pressure is not… More

Pressure ulcers are a serious medical problem with annual treatment costs over $1 billion dollars. While the exact etiology involves a complex combination of factors, it is generally accepted that prolonged pressure to soft tissues results in discrete areas of acute ischemia. If the pressure is not… More

A number of military situations require individual soldiers and pilots to instantaneously respond to complex visual scenes and make rapid decisions regarding potential threats. Text and graphics overlaid on the scene provide a means to aid the soldier in the decision making process. Helmet mounted… More

In Phase I, EM Photonics demonstrated the viability of using a reconfigurable hardware approach to accelerating the simulation of electronic circuits based on their electromagnetic properties. In Phase II, this technology will be used to create a solver capable of analyzing mixed signal circuits 64… More

The overall objective of this Phase II project is to optimize the fabrication procedure associated with the chemical lithography proposed in Phase I to fabricate nanophotonic structures and devices at a fraction of the cost of existing technologies. We plan to use our optimized chemical lithography… More

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to accurately measure in vivo tendon forces would have a broad impact on studying tissue properties, advancing assistive technologies, and furthering our scientific understanding of the human neuromuscular control system. Myoelectric prosthetics and… More

Identifying a means of accurately simulating the scattering and radiation from large objects and scenes in a reasonable timeframe has been an active area of research for decades. Traditionally, addressing this problem has required either trading accuracy and flexibility for performance or running… More

In this proposal we will develop a general method for fabricating 3D polymer based Photonic Crystal structures (PhCs) with engineered defects. The criterions of such a method include the generality of producing various periodic arrangements of 2D, 3D PhCs with or without aperiodic features,… More

Over the past few decades, computational electromagnetics (CEM) researchers have been making steady progress towards the development of efficient algorithms, such as the Method of Moments (MoM), for simulating scattering from electrically large targets. Unfortunately, such techniques have proved… More

Photonic crystals have led the way for miniaturizing application specific optical integrated circuit (ASOIC) to a scale comparable to the wavelength of light which in turn made them a good candidate for next generation high-density optical systems and interconnects. Polymer based Photonic Crystal… More

Atmospheric disturbances are a major performance-limiting factor in long-range optical systems. In particular, for the Airborne Laser (ABL) the ability of distinguish targets from a long distance is crucial for mission success. Despite the progress in optics and sensor technology, blurring in… More

While the need for effective millimeter wave (mmW) imaging systems is clear, there remains a significant gap in the technology needed to realize it, namely the ability to process and enhance mmW imagery in a real-time manner. This is particularly important because raw mmW images appear very fuzzy,… More

Optically interconnected systems provide a number of additional benefits. For example, by removing metallic traces, many signal integrity issues are also eliminated as the parasitic capacitance and inductance associated with high-speed lines are removed, which further improves systems performance.… More

Range surveillance is a critical component of space exploration because of its implications on safety, cost, and overall mission timeline. However, launch delays, due to the difficulty of verifying a cleared range, are common and will increase as spaceports are developed in new areas. In order to… More

The recent performance increases in graphics processing units (GPUs) have made graphics cards an attractive platform for implementing computationally intense applications. With their numerous parallel computational pipelines and SIMD architecture, modern GPUs can outperform high-end microprocessors… More

Long-range imaging is a critical component to many NASA applications including range surveillance, launch tracking, and astronomical observation. However, significant degradation occurs when imaging through the Earth's atmosphere. The subsequent effects of poor image quality range from… More

While the need for effective millimeter wave (mmW) imaging systems is clear, there remains a significant gap in the technology needed to realize it, namely the ability to process and enhance mmW imagery in a real-time manner. This is particularly important because raw mmW images appear very fuzzy,… More

UAVS (Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle System) integration with naval vessels is currently realized in limited form. This is largely due to the fact that the operational envelopes of these vehicles are based solely on at-sea flight testing. In addition to the complexities involved with at-sea flight… More

MDA is currently developing advanced interceptors for its BMDS. Imaging technology is crucial to this effort for several purposes, including navigation, false-alarm/decoy identification, and estimation of position and speed of potential targets. Although high-resolution imaging systems are readily… More

For this project, we plan to collaborate with researchers in the neuroscience department at the University of Delaware to develop an FPGA-based embedded computer, inspired in the brains small vertebrates (fish). The mechanisms of object detection and avoidance in fish have been extensively studied… More

FPGAs have attracted a great deal of attention over the past decade because of their performance, scalability, and cost relative to traditional hardware platforms. However, one of the most significant disadvantages of FPGAs is based on the underlying architecture on which they are built. … More

The recent performance increases in graphics processing units (GPUs) have made graphics cards an attractive platform for implementing computationally intense applications. With their numerous parallel computational pipelines and SIMD architecture, modern GPUs can outperform high-end microprocessors… More

The next generation of photovoltaic systems need to meet both physical (shape, size, packaging, durability) and electronic (efficiency, stability) requirements of applications that are not possible to implement today. One of these requirements is to be able to stretch electronic devices without… More

Recent advances in computing have produced special-purpose hardware comprised of vector processors streamlined for high-performance computations. Development of these devices, such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell Processor), has been advanced by the videogame… More

MDA is currently developing advanced interceptor technology for its BMDS. High-quality imagery is crucial to this effort for several purposes, including navigation, false-alarm/decoy identification, and estimation of position and speed of potential targets. Although high-resolution imaging systems… More

Optical components for RF-photonic applications such as communication satellites, avionics, optical networks, sensors and phase array radar will require high speed, high capacity and low power. Due to the nature of crystalline electro-optic materials (LiNbO3, GaAs, InP, etc.) today's commercial… More

This proposal deals with advanced design architectures for realizing silicon-based reconfigurable and stackable photonic analog signal processing engines supported on flexible or flat substrates using crystalline Si-based nanomembrane technology. Silicon nanomembranes are single crystals of Si that… More

Many large-scale numerical simulations can be broken down into common mathematical routines. While the applications may differ, they often need to perform standard functions such as system solves, Fourier transforms, or eigenvalue calculations. Consequently, producing fast, efficient implementations… More

Many large-scale numerical simulations can be broken down into common mathematical routines. While the applications may differ, the need to perform functions such as matrix solves, Fourier transforms, or eigenvalue analysis routinely arise. Consequently, targeting fast, efficient implementations… More

Optical CDMA is most suitable to be applied to high speed LAN to achieve contention-free, zero delay access, where traffic tends to be bursty rather than continuous. Channel assignment is much easier with CDMA. CDMA isolates irregular channels so that they do not influence other channels, CDMA can… More

Commodity graphics processing units (GPUs) offer tremendous computational throughput for relatively little cost. They have been shown to outperform microprocessors in the important metrics of FLOPS/dollar, FLOPS/Watt, and FLOPS/unit space and have already been applied to a wide range of numerically… More

The ultimate goal of this Commercialization Pilot Program (CPP) effort is to design, build, and integrate flight-ready custom electronics for a 220-channel MMW distributed-aperture imager. This work bases on a previous SBIR project, in which we constructed a single-channel prototype of the phase… More

In this Phase I SBIR effort we will investigate the feasibility of design and optimization of an optically interconnected optical router using a photonic crystal-based switching fabric and by carefully engineering the spatial and temporal properties of such periodic structures. We will take multiple… More

At the heart of scientific computing and numerical analysis are linear algebra solvers. In scientific computing, the focus is on the partial differential equations (PDEs) that arise from computational fluid dynamics (CFD), climate modeling, astrophysics, and structural and heat analysis that cannot… More

In an attempt to build more computationally powerful systems and improve the FLOPS/dollar and FLOPS/Watt of high-performance computers (HPCs), we have recently seen the proliferation of GPU-based clusters. Many major vendors are now supporting this technology and such systems are becoming… More

Space-based imaging sensors are important for NASA's mission in both performing scientific measurements and producing literature and documentary cinema. The recent proliferation of high-definition capture devices and displays (HDTV) provide the general public with first-hand human experiences… More

ABSTRACT: We propose to apply modern massively multicore processors to a key problem area of interest to the Air Force: multiphysics computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structural dynamics (CSD) solvers. The capabilities of the CPU to solve these problems have been increasing… More

ABSTRACT: Crystalline semiconductor nanomembranes (NMs) possess the electronic/photonic properties of bulk material, although they are flexible, deformable, and conformable. Semiconductor nanomembranes offer unique opportunities for novel active/ passive electronic, and photonic devices suitable… More

ABSTRACT: Optical interconnects are the natural choice for interconnecting different chips when current interconnect technologies cannot fulfill current and future system requirements. Examples of optical interconnect architectures are free-space multistage interconnect, optical fiber interconnect,… More

Next-generation high-performance computers (HPCs) are built as massively parallel systems where the parallelism exists at many levels. These systems are a collection of nodes all working together. Each node generally contains more than one processor and each processor contains multiple cores. … More

ABSTRACT: High-performance computing (HPC) programmers and domain experts, such as those in the Air Force's research divisions, develop solvers for a wide variety of application areas such as modeling next generation aircraft and weapons designs and advanced image processing analysis. When… More

ABSTRACT: Optical control of RF-signal transmission presents an attractive avenue for processing and transmitting RF information using various optical components, as opposed to electronic control, where metallic wires/cables are required. On a macroscopic scale, optical fibers offer low… More

Flight-testing is a crucial component in NASA's mission to research and develop of new aeronautical concepts, allowing for verification of simulated and wind-tunnel results, and exposing previously unforeseen design problems. Video is an invaluable tool for flight-testing, allowing the… More

Despite its promise, OpenCL adoption is slow, owing to a lack of libraries and tools. Vendors have shown few signs of plans to provide OpenCL libraries, and were they to do so they would likely be incompatible with one another, much as NVIDIA's BLAS (CUDA) is presently not interchangeable with… More