Award Data

Graphene has become one of the most promising new materials to form semiconductor devices and microelectronic interconnects. NexGenSemi Corporation in collaboration with Sandia National Labs will develop a “Patterned Graphene Interconnect (PGI) and material modification for nanofabrication of transistor devices. This process resolution will dip deep down into the state-of-the-art technology no ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Research phase I program will develop a new class of surface plasmon enhanced photovoltaic devices that exhibit increased current collection. Photon management, the manipulation of the incident optical field to increase the probability that a photon is absorbed in the active region of the cell, is critical to the development of next generation thin film sol ...

The key to making quantum key distribution practical (especially for free-space applications) is to be able to use weak laser pulses (WLP) instead of single photons, while at the same time making sure that any third party wanting to avoid detection and mount an eavesdropping attack is restricted to using beam-splitting rather than photon-number splitting (PNS). In this effort, we propose a novel s ...

This Phase I STTR proposal will demonstrate nanostructured “metal-black” coatings to enhance absorption by thin film solar cells. The problem is that silicon has low absorption due to its indirect gap. The opportunity is that nano-scale metallic scattering centers increase the effective optical path length and enhance the solar electric-field strength in thin-film solar cells, leading to more ...

Higher efficiency solar cells are needed to reduce solar array mass, volume, and cost for Air Force space missions. Intermediate-band quantum-dot (QD) solar cells can yield dramatically higher efficiencies than current multi-junction (MJ) technologies. However, several issues must be addressed to demonstrate manufacturable, high efficiency devices. CFDRC aims to develop: 1) High-efficiency, ligh ...

Quantum cryptography, and in particular Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a secure method to distribute a secret key between two distant authorized partners whose security is based on the laws of physics. Current public key cryptosystems have not been proven to be secure and are based on the computational complexity of evaluating one-way functions. These functions are easily evaluated, but extrem ...

We intend to use the emerging technology of compressed sensing and related new algorithms of information science to (1)increase our capacity for hyperspectral image acquisition beyond current capacity by developing new imaging and spectroscopic systems,(2) expand the frontiers from signal recovery to new applications, emphasizing knowledge learning including target and anamoly detection, and (3)st ...

Cost effective semiconductor processing tools that enable the high-resolution nano-fabrication of low-volume electronics are needed by the DOD. The printing of ultra-fine gratings on silicon wafers using interference immersion lithography is envisaged as a first maskless process step in the fabrication of advanced application specific integrated circuits. Next generation interference immersion lit ...

The goal of this proposal is to demonstrate the feasibility of new multi-scale models for linking higher order micro-structure descriptions to failure initiation and crack propagation for high cycle fatigue of high strength titanium alloys. This includes new high temperature materials such as the lightweight intermetallic titanium aluminide turbine blades to be used in the lower pressure sections ...

Our objective is to develop advanced mediator architectures for efficient electron transfer in enzymatic fuel cells (EFCs) for low power systems. The proposed EFC will leverage ongoing research at both CFDRC and Michigan State University to provide a fully-integrated lightweight, low-cost, manufacturable, and renewable power supply, for various military and civilian applications. EFC systems offer ...