Award Data

Aluminum nitride is as an ideal thermal management material since it has a very high thermal conductivity and its electrical resistivity is comparable to that of ceramic insulators. Aluminum nitride has thermal conductivity five times greater than alumina and has mechanical strength twice that of alumina and beryllium oxide. The current methods of synthesizing and consolidating aluminum nitride re ...

MicroFab Research (MFR, Inc.) proposes to apply the techniques of micromachining to aid in the fabrication of millimeter wave components, thereby reducing manufacturing expenses. Many microwave applications such as radar and communication systems would be improved by shifting to higher frequencies, provided new lower cost manufacturing techniques can be found. A manufacturing technique is presente ...

The Phase I proposal addresses the feasibility of forming a power microswitch using micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. The principle of operation is based on the use of Ni surface micro-machining, combined with surface hardening approaches for long life. During Phase I we will investigate design and feasibility aspects of such switches. Phase II would involve research and developme ...

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Real time thin film holographic elements are crucial components in optical signal processing technologies. There is a need for the development of materials to record both permanent and re-configurable holograms. Polymeric photorefractive (PR) materials show promise as inexpensive holographic media. MTI proposes to develop a new class of polymeric PR materials. These are thermally crosspolymerizabl ...

Sensors, capacitors, and conducting features such as resistors and capacitors on circuit boards are produced from metal and ceramic powders 1-12 These powders are manufactured by liquid phase precipitation routes which often start with reduction of metal salts or by solid-state routes where solid reactants are mixed, heated and then milled. The solid-state processing is generally repeated several ...

Commercially realizing viable nonvolatile ferroelectric random access memory (NVFRAM) was hampered in previous decades by problems related to either the reliable performance of the ferroelectric capacitor or to the growth and processing of capacitor layers In the past several years the reliability of ferroelectric capacitor such as fatigue, retention, and imprint of polarization has been significa ...

This SBIR Phase I project intends to develop a new fabrication and packaging technology that would lead to ultra low cost, high quality integrated optics device with improved performance. We are proposing in this program to develop monolithic sol-gel-on-silicon structures that utilize the low cost and low temperature sol-gel method to form silica based optical waveguides on silicon with V-grooves ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop novel low-dielectric constant thin film materials for electronic packaging applications using a sol-gel technique. The major driving force for the development of new dielectric materials is the need for low dielectric constants to limit the RC delay in electronic interconnects as ICs scale below 0.5 um in an attempt to ...

Microstrip-geometry phase shifters have had limited use at microwave frequencies because of high insertion loss resulting from resistance in the metal conductors. With the use of YBCO meanderline circuits in a glue contact with a magnetized ferrite substrate nonreciprocal differential phase shift in excess of 1000 degree/dB has recently been demonstrated by a group at MIT Lincoln Labs. Such a cont ...