Award Data

Physical Sciences Inc. and Purdue University propose to develop a high performance solid rocket propellant (SSRP) with significantly reduced infrared (IR) plume signature. The SSRP provides an increase in Specific Impulse (Isp), and equivalent Density Specific Impulse (ρIsp), relative to state-of-the-art aluminized hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) ammonium perchlorate (AP) composite prope ...

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI), in partnership with Brookhaven National Lab (BNL), will develop vacuum channel-based microelectronic analogues of the classic vacuum diodes and triodes, as well as novel single element logic gates. Proposed devices possess an inherent physical and data-fault tolerance of extreme conditions such as ionizing radiation and temperature. The key advance embodied by the pro ...

Nanoscale vacuum channel transistors (VCTs) recently attracted the attention of the microelectronics community due to their ability to operate at higher frequencies, with faster response and with higher reliability than the conventional field effect transistors (FETs). Importantly, VCTs can operate in harsh environments such as when exposed to ionizing radiation and/or subjected to high temperatur ...

Scintillator radiation detectors offer high sensitivity and relatively accurate radionuclide detection at a reasonable price. However, most of the available commercial scintillators have long decay times ranging from hundreds of nanoseconds to tens of microseconds. As a result, they have limited performance in high dose rate environments such as nuclear battlefields, robotic nuclear weapons test s ...

The event of nuclear explosion generates harsh radiation conditions, evaluation of which is critical in order to protect the military and civilian personnel from serious harm. Due to these harsh conditions only very simple methods of radiation assessment are employed, such as measurement of equivalent dose. Improvements to current instrumentation are sought that would provide energy resolved dose ...

Cermet, in collaboration with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, proposes to implement a lattice matched III-Nitride technology using existing substrates. The implementation of a lattice matched substrate promises to produce near dislocationfree III-Nitrides for the first time while the use of an existing substrate technology dramatically lowers development cost and reduces the devel ...

The objective of this proposal is to demonstrate the feasibility of growing centimeter-size aluminum nitride (AlN) crystals by subliming polycrystalline AlN in nitrogen atmosphere, and to demonstrate single crystalline quality meeting or exceeding thestandards of commercially available SiC wafers. The growth process, which utilizes high temperature, subatmospheric pressure and a steep temperature ...

Silicon has long been the semiconductor of choice for high-voltage power electronic applications. Recently, SiC has attracted attention because SiC is projected to have better performance than silicon. [1] SiC power switching devices have yet to becommercialized, largely due to SiC crystal defects, most notably the device-killing micropipe defect, which does not permit high total current parts t ...

A random access, solid-state, optical cross-switch capable of 770 channel discrimination in the telecommunications C-band is designed and proven as an alternative to current thin-film WDM devices and as a mechanically robust alternative tomicroelectromechanical (MEMS) WDM devices. The device may be used in multiplexing (mux), demultiplexing (demux), or complete cross-switch configurations, and is ...

The wide-bandgap semiconductors GaN and SiC hold great promise for high temperature and highpower electronic devices. This is due to the attractive properties these materials possess, such as wide energy bandgaps, high breakdown fields, high thermalconductivities, and high saturated electron velocities. In addition, GaN and SiC have adequate electron mobilities and can readily be doped n and p ty ...