Technology

By Mark Jones I’ve discovered a new sport, one made possible by Erik Rintamaki. No, he’s not the inventor of pickleball — and the sport I found is not the fastest growing in the U.S. My new sport is a bit more scientific and, for R&Ders, it comes with a useful allegory. The sport I…

Fiber arrays are used for constructing optical phased-array lasers, which are used in high-power industrial applications and beam steering for lidar. MIT has developed and built an all-glass, monolithic fiber array that is smaller and more robust than standard arrays. Fiber arrays are used for constructing optical phased-array lasers that can enable power scaling and…

The R&D World Index (RDWI) for the week ending February 18, 2022, closed at 5,075.11 for the 25 companies in the RDWI. The Index was down -2.18% (or 113.00 basis points) from the week ending February 11, 2022. The stock of nine RDWI members gained value from 0.96% (Novartis) to 6.14% (Cisco). The stock of…

By Steve Martin, Purdue Research Foundation An invention from Purdue University and the Indiana Department of Transportation that uses wireless communication devices could save lives at high-speed traffic signals. Principal research analyst Howell Li and transportation research engineer Jijo Mathew of the Joint Transportation Research Program in Purdue University’s Lyles School of Civil Engineering have…

Liberty Defense Holdings, a technology provider of concealed weapons and threat detection solutions, announces that its millimeter-wave shoe screening technology, initially developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and a 2020 R&D 100 award winner, was awarded the 2022 Interagency Partnership Award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC). The annual FLC awards…

Spectrally Efficient Digital Logic (SEDL), designed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory, is a set of digital logic building block families that can reduce overall product development costs by operating with intrinsically low EMI emissions. Lower EMI emissions can simplify PCB design and increase the likelihood of passing an EMI test on the first attempt. Low EMI…

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) equipment manufacturer GSSI’s SIR 4000 high-performance GPR system was used by Nepali surveyors and mountaineers who climbed to the top of Mount Everest as part of an expedition to establish the true height of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. Nepali surveyors and Sherpa guides set up a GPS antenna to…

ELCRES HTV150 film, from SABIC and Shin-Etsu Polymer Co., is the first engineering thermoplastic high-voltage, high-temperature film for DC link power capacitors capable of high energy densities over long periods of time without significant current leakage or charge loss. The film exhibits stable performance and offers excellent handling through metallization and capacitor building processes. ELCRES…

SIRIUS XHS, developed by Dewesoft d.o.o., is a high-speed data acquisition system with the new Hybrid ADC technology capable of high-bandwidth transient recording and very high-dynamic, alias-free data acquisition. Sirius XHS is the first device with Hybrid ADC technology capable of doing both high bandwidth transient recording and very high dynamic alias-free acquisition, and this…

The Precision Deicer, developed by Clinch River Computing and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, uses light-detection and ranging data to gauge the amount of salt or brine needed per section of road, judged against a vulnerability index that accounts for such variables as slope and solar radiation. This technology conserves public resources, ensures driver safety and…

By Gordon Feller, Contributing Writer Increasingly, trilateral R&D partnerships — linking government with academia and industry — are considered critical to the success of Silicon Valley. Such mixed partnerships succeed when they link industrial firms with governments with universities, especially as real-world variations of the “triple helix” model of innovation, which is a more common…

By Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office When you save an image to your smartphone, those data are written onto tiny transistors that are electrically switched on or off in a pattern of “bits” to represent and encode that image. Most transistors today are made from silicon, an element that scientists have managed to switch…

Recently, I interviewed master inventor Dean Kamen, well known as the inventor of the stair climbing wheelchair and the Segway, as well as the creator of the FIRST Robotics competitions for school children. I explained to Dean how R&D World’s Global Funding Forecast was reporting that China will outspend the U.S. for the very first…

The (Continuously) Rotating Wind Turbine UAV Inspection System, from Metal Industries Research & Development Centre (MIRDC), replaces the existing procedure of implementing the wind turbine examination after the blades stop running. The new method not only redefines the logic to examine the wind turbine blades with the existing UAV, but also recreates the formation mode…

trinamiX, developer of 3D and infrared sensing solutions and a subsidiary of BASF, announced its vision to bring Near-Infrared Spectroscopy into smartphones based on Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platforms at the Snapdragon Tech Summit Digital 2020.  trinamiX’s sensing technology will empower end consumers to identify the molecular composition of material enabling them to optimize their decision…

Following up on the enormous success of the first two episodes of R&D 100 – The Podcast, we are happy to report that Episode 3 is now live! Today, co-hosts Paul J. Heney and Aimee Kalnoskas, editors with R&D World magazine, are day drinking — but it’s all in the name of science! We swear! In…

By Chris Adam New autonomous sensor technology may help businesses monitor refrigeration and heating systems in real time much faster and easier than current options. Researchers at Purdue University developed the sensor to monitor the oil circulation ratio in real time for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration systems. The oil circulation ratio provides data…

5G’s success relies on the availability of quality mobile devices. Keysight Technologies’ Keysight E7515B UXM 5G Wireless Test Platform is a software-defined test platform that emulates a real network for engineers to validate and test 5G device performance. It combines the most advanced RF and digital hardware with world-class software for chipset/device makers, network operators…

By Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office To capture panoramic views in a single shot, photographers typically use fisheye lenses — ultra-wide-angle lenses made from multiple pieces of curved glass, which distort incoming light to produce wide, bubble-like images. Their spherical, multipiece design makes fisheye lenses inherently bulky and often costly to produce. Now engineers…

By Abby E Bower Horizon31, of Knoxville, Tenn., has exclusively licensed a novel communication system that allows users to reliably operate unmanned vehicles such as drones from anywhere in the world using only an internet connection. The technology, developed by the startup’s founders at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will enable commercial,…

What scientists and engineers need to know to help keep software, hardware and connected systems secure By Patricia Panchak, Contributing Writer In the cat-and-mouse struggle against bad actors in our inter-networked world, scientists and engineers are on the front lines. As developers of technology that can mean the difference between an adversarial breach and a…

By Kayla Wiles A self-driving car has a hard time recognizing the difference between a toddler and a brown bag that suddenly appears into view because of limitations in how it senses objects using lidar. The autonomous vehicle industry is exploring “frequency modulated continuous wave” (FMCW) lidar to solve this problem. Researchers have built a…

By about 2025, China will likely surpass the U.S. for the first time ever in the amount of dollars spent on R&D. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to sit down with Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a first-term congresswoman from southeastern Pennsylvania (and an industrial engineer), who sits on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’…

By Becky Chambers Hennessy Collaboration is among the flagship strategies of innovation for research scientists, engineers and technical professionals. Here, three R&D experts weigh in on China as it rises to become the world’s top R&D investor. They also address some of the benefits and challenges of openness in research, and the inclusion of foreign…

A look at whether “to innovate, collaborate” is always the best strategy when it comes to global R&D By Becky Chambers Hennessy If ever there were a need for innovation through intellectual exchange and collaboration it is this: the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), reportedly first identified in China. R&D experts worldwide know this, and the U.S.…