Award Data

This SBIR effort proposes using live and continuous monitoring of metal tanks, pressure vessels, and pipelines using carbon nanomaterial-based sensing skins to detect excessive physical strains, cracks, and to inspect impact damage. The proposed research and development work leverages 15+ years of fundamental research. The key objective is to advance the TRL level and the scalability of carbon nan ...

Biomason’s prototype MEDUSA dust abatement system provides a superior performing, logistically lean, and environmentally friendly solution for rapid dust suppression for VTOL operations in austere, forward operating positions. Moreover, base MEDUSA systems and processes may be adapted for utilization in multiple industrial sectors and serve several other key military and civilian use-cases - fro ...

There is a critical need for DoD to develop power sources that will increase the mission lifetime for unattended sensors and sensor radio networks. In order to take advantage of recent advances in extremely low power subthreshold circuits to greatly exte...

Modern computer systems often incorporate multiple computational devices such as conventional processors, graphics processing units (GPUs), specialized accelerators, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Programmers are able to exploit these new architectures for improved performance and reduced power consumption, but at the cost of increased programing complexity. Further complicating matte ...

A new class of high-performance, low-SWaP computational devices is emerging based on increasingly diverse architectures. This diversity is improving performance, but comes at the cost of increased programming complexity. Each architecture requires variances in programming environment and model, typically distinguished by the type of parallelism supported by the hardware, limiting software portabil ...

Graph analytics is a key component in identifying emerging trends and threats in many real-world applications. Large-scale graph analytics frameworks provide a convenient and highly scalable platform for developing algorithms to analyze large datasets. Although conceptually scalable, these techniques exhibit poor performance on modern computational hardware. Another model of graph computation has ...

Passive microwave sensors aboard satellites provide valuable information regarding weather conditions by measuring atmospheric attenuation over a broad range of frequencies from 0-200 GHz. Additional ground-based sensors are desirable to provide complementary upward looking measurements that can be used to refine existing attenuation models. Operating over such a large bandwidth, however, places ...

In the proposed effort, we will leverage this extensive experience and capabilities to realize a frequency agile mmW radiometer that can cover the range of DC-110 GHz and can be scaled to DC-200 GHz under Phase II. Ours is a photonic system that multiplies and up-coverts a low-frequency reference signal onto an optical carrier (laser) using EO modulation, then uses the modulation sidebands to inj ...

In this SBIR effort we will design (Phase I) and demonstrate (Phase II) an integrated silicon electronic-photonic upconversion receiver that when used with our photonic backend will allow for a highly sensitive, real-time, and economical millimeter wave (mmW) imaging system. The development of this chip leverages recent progress in CMOS and SiGe HBT high speed analog circuit design and integrates ...

In this Phase II SBIR effort we will dramatically reduce the size, weight, and power requirements of a passive millimeter wave imaging system based on optical upconversion. To this end, we will integrate custom silicon-germanium low noise amplifiers that have been designed to efficiently couple with our high performance lithium niobate upconversion modules. In Phase I we analyzed the design requ ...