| COVER STORY | | | Still Lasing After All These Years | | | | ELECTRONICS | | | Building a Better Radar System | | | | OPTICS | | | Coating for Many Colors | | | | SENSORS | | | Detection Plus Protection | | | | Seeing Quanta of Light | | | | Comfort Hinges on Composites | | | | COOLING | | | Cool Under Pressure | | | | DEPARTMENTS | | | From the Editor | | | | Mind Your Business | | | | Mind Your Business | | |
Still Lasing After All These Years
A wide-ranging laser fills plenty of medical niches.
Decades after MDA’s stewardship, an innovative laser program continues to support ground-breaking research, taking aim at persistent infections and a revolutionary wound-closure method.
In the dozen years since the MDA TechUpdate reported on Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, MA), laser-based therapies that had just begun to bud are now in full bloom. Applications that were in their infancy, such as “fractionated” lasers for skin resurfacing and laser-based hair removal, are now well entrenched in medical practice. In the case of laser depilation, you can even buy a home kit for use (if you have a bit of discretionary cash).  |
Building a Better Radar System
Scalable architecture offers savings for signal processing.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, radars, medical imagers, and communications transmission stations could benefit from a new signal-processing architecture that is lightweight, scalable, and relatively inexpensive. |
Coating for Many Colors
Novel material improves optical sensors.
A new anti-reflective coating has two faces: it can sequester light more efficiently in optical sensors or solar cells, or it can keep light from being detected by other sensors.
Magnolia Optical Technologies, Inc. (Woburn, MA), has developed an anti-reflective optical coating that can both reduce the cost and improve the performance of optical sensors and has potential applications for solar cells and medical optics. The coating, developed with help from several supporting MDA Phase I SBIRs to optimize the multicolor sensor performance of MDA’s next-generation focal plane arrays, function to capture as much incident light as possible, from ultraviolet (UV) to infrared (IR) with visible light in between. |
Detection Plus Protection
Component guards electronics against nuclear hiccups.
A company with a history of research funding from MDA is steadily building a business developing nuclear event detectors, radiation-hardened analog-to-digital converters, and customized mixed signal integrated circuits—a portfolio of technologies that could prove enabling in areas such as handheld devices, sensing and imaging, operating devices off of scavenged energy sources, and other applications in which ultra low power consumption is important. |
Seeing Quanta of Light
New design brings single-photon detection to laser range-finding, ladar, and secure laser communications.
Voxtel, Inc. (Beaverton, OR), has developed a near-infrared (NIR) detector with single-photon sensitivity that can be used to improve many applications, from better eye-safe lasers to speeding up tomorrow’s optical computers. |
Comfort Hinges on Composites
Shape-memory material could improve prosthetics and sporting goods.
Ashape-memory composite material developed for satellite antennas could prove useful in prosthetics and next-generation ski boots.
The material, identified by the trade name TEMBO®, was developed by Composite Technology Development (CTD; Lafayette, CO). The TEMBO concept grew out of government-funded research to develop elastic memory composite (EMC) hinges to deploy structures in space-based applications. This EMC hinge has been used in place of motor-driven or spring-actuated hinges to deploy devices such as a solar array. Such an approach relies on electrical heaters to activate the shape memory material in the hinges, which then deploys the packaged structure to the shape needed for operation on orbit. |
Cool Under Pressure
A tiny advanced cryocooler uses sound waves to drive out heat.
A small device that uses sound to directly move heat could make refrigeration less costly and far more efficient, support cryogenic cooling applications for sensors, and improve the safety of MRI units. |
Looking at the Long Term
Applying a solution to more than one problem can increase R&D payoff.
IfNecessity is the mother of Invention, then Problems are the father. Problems, after all, beget Solutions. And when it comes to innovation, it’s important not to lose sight of the ultimate problem that will be solved by a particular invention. |
The Right Time and the Right Price
Values (and value) act as drivers when leaders mull the sale of a company.
Owners of successful small businesses know their products forwards and backwards. They can rattle off the benefits of their offerings. They can pinpoint the right customer segment for their products. They are masters at understanding their costs and at pricing products for profitability and company success. And many of them have proven themselves adept at timing—knowing when to jump in to a promising market to offer products and services that meet a burgeoning demand. But when the product they are selling is the company itself, a lot of small-business owners fall flat on their faces. |
Now You See it Now You Don't
A small SBIR prototype could present an IP-protection challenge.
When SBIR or STTR researchers submit data and other goodies to government agencies, it’s up to the researchers to protect their data rights by properly labeling their submissions. Fred Patterson, a volunteer consultant for MDA’s Technology Applications program, wrote extensively on the topic last year in MDA TechUpdate. (See “It’s Up to You to Protect Your SBIR Data Rights,” MDA TechUpdate, Fall 2008.) But there’s a related issue that the article didn’t quite address: How do you label small prototypes to protect your intellectual property when you submit SBIR- or STTR-related work to the Government? |
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