Award Data

The concern identified in the DARPA Impact of Cockpit Electro-Magnetics on Aircrew Neurology (ICEMAN) STTR Opportunity Announcement is that strong electromagnetic fields (EMF) within modern Department of Defense (DoD) aircraft cockpits may be degrading pilot performance and potentially leading to mishaps including loss of life.  Proposers received funding for a Phase 1 effort responding to the an ...

It is unknown how cockpit EM and RF exposures might affect pilot performance and physiology.  Animal, human, and physics research indicate that a pathway for such exposures to impact human physiology exists via aggregations of magnetite, a ferromagnetic nanocrystal.  Aggregations of magnetite have been found in many animal tissues, including in the human brain; they have been linked to magnetore ...

Continuing advances in solid state storage technology have enabled detachable storage devices that are inexpensive, high bandwidth and high capacity, making them practical for sharing even large amounts of data among devices that need not be networked.  For this reason, they are very attractive as a mechanism for secure data storage as well as transfer. Unfortunately the current generation of me ...

Page 2 of 2 The Department of Defense (DoD) must negotiate profit that is fair and reasonable to both the Buyer and the Seller. The DoD relies on profit to both attract the investment capital of innovative contractors and provide an incentive to perform efficiently. It relies heavily on the concept that the relationship between profit and risk should be proportional. At first, this seems to be a t ...

Systems software can be tricked into performing unintended computation by feeding it carefully crafted inputs that corrupt and leak internal state. Modern software is so complex that implementation defects, some of which are exploitable, will only be discovered in the field. Operating systems isolate the state of each process such that a program experiencing an error does not bring down the entire ...

Topic 17B-005 calls for a new process for supplying medical grade O2 without the use of O2 bottles or pressure (or vacuum) swing absorption (PSA) technology. This is significant to the military for several reasons, because these two sources currently interfere with logistical supply of O2 to where it is required, namely field hospital units. PSA units reportedly have limited shelf life and supply ...

High concentrations of supplemental oxygen are used routinely by pilots and divers prior to and during missions to prevent and treat decompression sickness, avoid detection during covert operations, and to support oxygenation following pulmonary injury. Due to pulmonary oxygen toxicity (PO2T), exposure limits are imposed to prevent damage to pulmonary tissues. Current policy focuses on preventing ...

Memory sticks are a convenient mechanism for portable data storage and transfer. Unfortunately, the embedded microcontroller required to present raw flash as a USB peripheral exposes an attack surface that can enable privilege escalation on a host computer even in the presence of tamper-resistant device designs, data encryption, and host protections such as anti-virus software. We propose Twi ...

Wide Band Gap semiconductors with advanced topographies allow much higher power densities and efficiencies than prior generation power electronics.   Power density is a function of switching speed and cooling requirements, and operating at or above 50KHz allows for a dramatic reduction in size and weight of power electronics for power conditioning, converting, and motor control.  Powdermet has ...

There is potential for intense, pulsed and non-uniform electromagnetic fields (EMFs) to exist within DoD tactical aircraft, and the potential for such EMFs to degrade pilot performance and lead to serious mishaps including loss of life. Proposers will begin with a methodical study of the actual EMF environments in the cockpits of representative aircraft to establish nature of any extreme fields pr ...