Award Data

From 2012-2015 the world’s first printed amperometric gas sensors were developed at KWJ Engineering Inc. as the subject of an NSF SBIR. The patented technology was used to found SPEC-sensor LLC and obtain commercial funds. More than one million sensors have been sold using SPEC’s patented designs, which led to the recent acquisition by Interlink Electronics, Inc. The next challenge is to grow ...

The 21st century is the Age of the Network. Operators and clients of critical infrastructure networks are now vulnerable to cascading failures that they could not have seen coming. “Cascading” failure events remain a vital unsolved challenge as critical infrastructure network operators and regulators struggle to define and operationalize resilience, and measurement of interdependent network re ...

Over a decade ago, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) invented a cold cathode electron field emitter with the potential to disrupt the state of the art for imaging and communications systems. NIST showed that these devices, comprising nanoporous silicon carbide structures of various hierarchical shapes, can emit electrons from their surfaces purely by applicati ...

The promise of personalized medicine can be realized in part via point-of-care 3D drug printing, but only if there are reliable quality measures available. Children and seniors may need custom or easy-to-swallow doses, a need now addressed only in a limited way by ad-hoc in-pharmacy compounding. Compliance-targeted enhancements such as flavor and shape choices are particularly important for childr ...

Verification and validation (V&V) of ICs have become progressively difficult as design complexity, the reuse of third-party intellectual property, and malicious attacks on microelectronics have all increased. Given these challenges, the DoD needs automated, user-friendly post-synthesis verification and validation solutions to assure its critical hardware systems. To address this need, ECI presents ...

Currently, the US has limited production facilities for opening switches, e.g., DSRDs, which are manufactured with very outdated manufacturing methods and technology, e.g., based on deep diffusion of dopants into a thinned silicon wafer. The goal of this effort is to develop scaled manufacturing processes, manufacture batch quantities, and enable high-volume manufacturing of semiconductor opening ...

SI2 Technologies, Inc. (SI2) proposes to develop 3D-printed for spacecraft microelectronics. Leveraging SI2’s extensive additive manufacturing experience, SI2’s low-SWaP, low-cost shielding will be designed to protect both unmounted and board-mounted microelectronics. This approach will accommodate multiple types and sizes of semiconductor packages, including 484 ball Fine Pitch Ball Grid Arra ...

SiC IGBT devices remain restricted from achieving higher voltage operation due the lack of a supply chain (onshore or otherwise) for thick n-channel epitaxial wafers. Some researchers have reported success in improving SiC to accommodate higher voltage IGBTs. However, commercial exploitation of this knowledge has not occurred due to a much larger market for moderate voltage transistors. Detailed f ...

This research aims to develop decision support tools for better maintenance and planning of renewable energy generation and storage assets using atmospheric, local weather, and on-ground environmental data blended with site-, regional- and national-generation data. The study will use a combination of these data to understand the relationship between non-cloud cover based atmospheric conditions and ...

The Orbital Wildfire Resilience (OWR) project comprises the innovative combination of MyRadar’s miniaturized satellite technology, onboard Artificial Intelligence (AI) processing, and wide-reaching dissemination platform to improve the wildfire hazard resilience of stakeholders. This research facilitates the development of new MyRadar commercial alerting, nowcasting, and satellite imagery produc ...