Award Data

GaN (Gallium Nitride) High Electron Mobility Transistor (HFET) devices face severe thermal control problems as a result of high power densities which result from the need for more power and the ongoing reduction in geometries of individual devices. The device lattice temperature increases under high power causing several detriment effects: a) The carrier phonon scattering rate increases causing a ...

The Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) requires a method for a distributed, near real-time, security management system that provides comprehensive situational awareness of the Information Assurance state of the BMDS and its components. Altusys has de

The Nation has made substantial investments in new and unprecedented radar systems for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) segment of the missile defense mission. Such GMD radars can achieve record breaking power-aperture products required for long range detection and tracking of potentially weak targets. The aforementioned capabilities arise from the requirement to: “detect, track and iden ...

Thermal battery pellets must be manufactured to extremely tight weight and density tolerances. Currently, this production process is a rate-limiting step in thermal battery manufacture. Inspection of pellets is currently performed manually, slowing the

Thermal batteries are mission critical components which provide power to military weapon systems for electronics, fusing, sensing and actuation. Current and future thermal battery packaging and performance requirements are being pushed to the limits, demanding higher power levels over longer operating times (hence, higher usable energy output) in smaller, lighter packages. These increases are req ...

A self-powered cook-off sensor is a critical path item for meeting federally mandated insensitive mention (IM) requirements. The sensor must reliably help the venting system mitigate fast and slow cook off when temperatures hit the range of 275°F to 350°F. The output from the sensor must appropriately and consistently power the SRM venting system. MSI’s proposed solution is to use modules t ...

Avionic systems currently used within the interceptor segment continue to carry a high development and deployment price tag. Bulky configurations with heavier than necessary subsystems and components limit the range and missions they can be directed to. Present and future threats demand orders of magnitude higher performance and bandwidths from computing and electronics systems while operating hos ...

The proposed effort will develop a novel radiation classifier for detecting optical and non-optical sources causing interference or potential damage to the STSS spacecraft. Two distinct sensor compnents will be used in the design. A pulse-optimized sensor with multiple coincidence channels will detect optical transient events and provide data on space weather (i.e., particle events and energy di ...

Silicon carbide (SiC) has long been recognized as an attractive mirror material due to its superior mechanical and thermal properties when compared to conventional optical materials. However, the extreme mechanical strength results in significant sub-surface damage (SSD) which needs to be removed by large area conformal polishing methods. The current state-of-the-art polishing methods are either t ...

In response to SBIR topic MDA08-029, USCI proposes to develop a unique 4H-SiC super-junction lateral JFET (SL-JFET), based on a novel and simple design, to solve all of the remaining problems facing the development of 4H-SiC power switches for resonant high-frequency power converter in radar applications, including the problems of high output coupling capacitance of vertical SiC MOSFETs that lead ...