TechBlog

HGH Infrared Systems, manufacturers of advanced infrared cameras and a variety of thermal imaging products and systems, introduced the new IR Revolution 360, a 20° vertical, 360° horizontal field of view (FOV) panoramic infrared vision system for security and surveillance.

The revolutionary sensor contains approx. 3 million pixels (10,000 x 288). This advanced thermal imager delivers clear, extremely high resolution imagery via the rotating head that scans a full 360-degree rotation per second. Other features include auto detection and tracking, a motion alarm, and an area-of-interest zoom.

The detector is based on mercury cadmium telluride (HgCdTe) imaging technology and operates in the 8 -12 micron wavelength, the long-wave infrared (LWIR) region. The high sensitivity (<25 mK) IR camera detection range, without image distortion, is up to 1 kilometer (km) for a human figure, up to 1.5 km for an automobile, and up to 6 km for a boat or ship.

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Continue reading ‘Androids are we close: See some of the videos and see for yourself’ »

Always on the verge of a seeming comeback, airships are back in the spotlight, touting new technologies. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency recently announced funding for an innovative, ballast-free airship technology created by Aeros Aeronautical Systems, based outside Los Angeles. The Aeroscraft ML866’s potentially revolutionary Control of Static Heaviness system compresses and decompresses helium in the 210-ft.-long envelope, changing this proposed sky yacht’s buoyancy during takeoff and landings, Aeros says.

It hopes to end the program with a test flight demonstrating the system. Other companies are planning their own first flights within the next few years. Each has a design that it promises will launch a new era of lighter-than-air transportation.

Bacteria often get bad press, with those found in water often linked to illness and disease. But researchers at The University of Nottingham are using these tiny organisms alongside the very latest membrane filtration techniques to improve and refine water cleaning technology.

These one-celled organisms eat the contaminants present in water — whether it is being treated prior to industrial use or even for drinking — in a process called bioremediation.

The water is then filtered through porous membranes, which function like a sieve. However, the holes in these sieves are microscopic, and some are so small they can only be seen at the nanoscale. Pore size in these filters can range from ten microns — ten thousandths of a millimetre — to one nanometre — a millionth of a millimetre.

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Gaithersburg, MD — Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have made the first direct measurements of the infinitesimal expansion and collapse of thin polymer films used in the manufacture of advanced semiconductor devices. It’s a matter of only a couple of nanometers, but it can be enough to affect the performance of next-generation chip manufacturing. The NIST measurements, detailed in a new paper,* offer a new insight into the complex chemistry that enables the mass production of powerful new integrated circuits. The smallest critical features in memory or processor chips include transistor “gates.” In today’s most advanced chips, gate length is about 45 nanometers, and the industry is aiming for 32-nanometer gates. To build the nearly one billion transistors in modern microprocessors, manufacturers use photolithography, the high-tech, nanoscale version of printing technology. The semiconductor wafer is coated with a thin film of photoresist, a polymer-based formulation, and exposed with a desired pattern using masks and short wavelength light (193 nm). The light changes the solubility of the exposed portions of the resist, and a developer fluid is used to wash the resist away, leaving the pattern which is used for further processing.

Exactly what happens at the interface between the exposed and unexposed photoresist has become an important issue for the design of 32-nanometer processes. Most of the exposed areas of the photoresist swell slightly and dissolve away when washed with the developer. However this swelling can induce the polymer formulation to separate (like oil and water) and alter the unexposed portions of the resist at the edges of the pattern, roughening the edge. For a 32-nanometer feature, manufacturers want to hold this roughness to at most about two or three nanometers.

Industry models of the process have assumed a fairly simple relationship in which edge roughness in the exposed “latent” image in the photoresist transfers directly to the developed pattern, but the NIST measurements reveal a much more complicated process. By substituting deuterium-based heavy water in the chemistry, the NIST team was able to use neutrons to observe the entire process at a nanometer scale. They found that at the edges of exposed areas the photoresist components interact to allow the developer to penetrate several nanometers into the unexposed resist. This interface region swells up and remains swollen during the rinsing process, collapsing when the surface is dried. The magnitude of the swelling is significantly larger than the molecules in the resist, and the end effect can limit the ability of the photoresist to achieve the needed edge resolution. On the plus side, say the researchers, their measurements give new insight into how the resist chemistry could be modified to control the swelling to optimal levels.

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1/7/2008 West Lafayette, IN — Researchers have developed a new modeling technique to study and design miniature “biosensors,” a tool that could help industry perfect lab-on-a-chip technology for uses ranging from medical diagnostics to environmental monitoring.The experimental devices represent a new class of portable sensors designed to capture and detect specific “target molecules,” which will allow the sensors to identify pathogens, DNA or other substances.Now researchers at Purdue University are the first to create “a new conceptual framework” and corresponding computational model to relate the shape of a sensor to its performance and explain why certain designs perform better than others, said Ashraf Alam, a professor of electrical and computer engineering.Findings also refute long-held assumptions about how to improve sensor performance.The researchers tested and validated their model with experimental data from various other laboratories.

“Many universities and companies are conducting experiments in biosensors,” Alam said. “The problem is that until now there has been no way to consistently interpret the wealth of data available to the research community. Our work provides a completely different perspective on how to analyze their data and how to interpret them.”

Research findings are detailed in a paper that appeared in the Dec. 21 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. The paper was written by electrical and computer engineering doctoral student Pradeep Nair and Alam.

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