Drew Feustel, Astronaut, Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX

Astronaut Drew Feustel is scheduled to fly aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery when it makes what is projected to be the final manned mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope....

Alternating-Composition Layered Ceramic Barrier Coatings

Ceramic thermal and environmental barrier coatings (T/EBCs) that contain multiple layers of alternating chemical composition have been developed as improved means of protecting...

Variable-Structure Control of a Model Glider Airplane

A variable-structure control system designed to enable a fuselage-heavy airplane to recover from spin has been demonstrated in a hand-launched, instrumented model glider airplane (see...

Axial Halbach Magnetic Bearings

Axial Halbach magnetic bearings have been investigated as part of an effort to develop increasingly reliable noncontact bearings for future high-speed rotary machines that may be used in such applications as...

Compact, Non-Pneumatic Rock-Powder Samplers

Tool bits that automatically collect powdered rock, permafrost, or other hard material generated in repeated hammering action have been invented. These tool bits are intended primarily for use as...

Biochips Containing Arrays of Carbon-Nanotube Electrodes

Biochips containing arrays of nanoelectrodes based on multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) are being developed as means of ultrasensitive electrochemical detection of specific...

Single-Grid-Pair Fourier Telescope for Imaging in Hard-X Rays and γ Rays

The figure is a simplified depiction of a proposed Fourier telescope for imaging in hard-x rays and γ rays. This instrument would contain only one pair of...

Bidirectional Pressure-Regulator System

A bidirectional pressure-regulator system has been devised for use in a regenerative fuel cell system. The bidirectional pressure- regulator acts as a back-pressure regulator as gas flows through the...

Prism Window for Optical Alignment

A prism window has been devised for use, with an autocollimator, in aligning optical components that are (1) required to be oriented parallel to each other and/or at a specified angle of incidence with...

Wireless Electronic Patches Improve Medical Data and Patient Mobility

Non-invasive and ambulatory monitoring of body parameters is receiving much interest from the medical, sports and entertainment world. Possible applications are the...

Omniscient Code Generation for 8-, 16- and 32-bit Microcontrollers

C-language programs are usually developed by teams of engineers who are often geographically dispersed, leading to redundant code and inconsistent variable declarations...

Using AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA in High-Availability Military Systems

The complexity of military and aerospace systems is growing — more components, interfaces, power, bandwidth, processing, features, and data — and these systems are...

Multipurpose Transaction Protocol: A New Data Transport Model

It is no secret that high-performance and the Internet are often seen as contradictory terms. Even private IP networks see serious performance challenges once they extend beyond...

Multimedia Host Processor

Renesas Technology America, Inc., (San Jose, CA) has released the SH-MobileR2 application processor for portable multimedia systems. The device enables the design of portable and mobile devices with multimedia...

FPGA Processing Engine

The FPE650 from VMETRO (Houston, TX) is a FPGA processing engine with support for the new FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC/VITA 57) standard. The FPE650 integrates four Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs with two FMC I/O sites and VPX...

Graphics-Class System Host Board

The TQ9 graphics-class system host board (SHB) from Trenton Technology (Atlanta, GA) is the latest addition to the PICMG® 1.3 product line. The TQ9, coupled with a PICMG 1.3 industry standard backplane,...

Microcontroller Evaluation Kit

The Stellaris® LM3S3768 Evaluation Board (EVB) from Luminary Micro (Austin, TX) is a compact and versatile evaluation platform for the Stellaris LM3S3768 ARM® Cortex™-M3-based microcontroller. The...

Power Supplies

Xantrex Technology Inc. (Vancouver, Canada) has launched the 222W linear XBT programmable power supply for laboratory and low power automated test equipment (ATE) applications. The new XBT Series provides higher power with two...

Virtual Machine Manager

TenAsys Corp. (Beaverton, OR) has released the eVM™ virtual machine manager for real-time, missioncritical systems. The eVM platform simultaneously hosts embedded and real-time operating systems (RTOS) along...

Fanless Single Board Computer

VersaLogic (Eugene, OR) has released a new low voltage, fanless version of its Cobra EBX single board computer (SBC). The new model features a low voltage 1.0 GHz Intel® Celeron®-M CPU and is fully...

FPGA-Based Processing Platform

Embedded Systems Design, Inc. (ESD) (Elkridge, MD) has released the StreamBlade™ 5600, a 3U desktop or rack-mount FPGA-based processing platform. The standalone real-time streaming I/O processing system...

Voice Control Processor

Zarlink Semiconductor Inc. (Ottawa, Canada) offers their second-generation Le79114 Voice Control Pro - cessor (VCP II) for communications carriers. The Le79114 VCP II supports 64 simultaneous call control channels and...