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Articles: Robotics, Automation & Control
Direct Torque Control (DTC) is widely used as a method for controlling AC motors in many demanding applications. It is a unique method for controlling AC motors. In...
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Articles: Electronics & Computers
30 Years of Electronics & Semiconductors
In celebration of the 30th Anniversary of NASA Tech Briefs, our features in 2006 highlight a different technology category each month, tracing the past 30 years of the technology, and continuing with a glimpse into the future of where the technology is headed. Along the way, we include insights from industry...
Articles
How Much Financing Does Your Growing Company Need?
How much money will your growing company need? The answer is, you want enough investment to grow the company to its potential, yet do not want to over-fund, giving up too much equity. You cannot raise funds without a reasonable estimate of what you need.
Articles: Photonics/Optics
Design for Manufacturing (DFM) has taken off like a rocket in the electronics industry in recent years. Performing process and device simulations on CMOS transistors in a DFM flow have proven to be...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
Historically, high-energy (Joule-class) nanosecond YAG lasers have been confined primarily to laboratory research facilities and government labs. System designs were unique for...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
It is widely known that the light emitting diode (LED) R&D and commercialization community is striving to produce higher power, bright-white-light LEDs. From both a temperature and...
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The Difference and Distance Between Invention and a Business
This issue begins a series of four articles that will focus on converting your invention into a revenue-generating business, the critical information you need to gather to get started, and how to put together the two initial documents to gather funding to start your business: financial...
Articles: Imaging
Potato chips, cell phones, razors, and baby diapers are just a few of the many everyday items made with the help of industrial machine vision. In fact, any product that...
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Articles: Imaging
The ability to make thermal measurements and image through materials that confound more expensive thermal cameras is pushing shortwave infrared (SWIR) sensors into a growing number of...
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Articles: Imaging
Traditional research on disease mechanisms in animal models mainly has relied either on the detection of morphological changes of the diseased tissues obtained through anatomical...
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Articles
Reduce Your Product Launch Time With "Lean" Principles
The Business Briefs series of articles takes you through the basics of developing and presenting a design idea, obtaining funding, protecting and licensing your intellectual property, and getting your ideas to market. This month, learn how Lean Product Development and Marketing can help you...
Articles: Data Acquisition
Mechanical CAD (computer-aided design) programs have become very sophisticated during the past few years. Unfortunately, there is still a portion of the engineering spectrum that cannot be...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
Photonics Tech Briefs (PTB) recently presented the 2005 Readers’ Choice Products of the Year at a special awards dinner held at The Water Club in New York City. The top three products...
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Articles: Robotics, Automation & Control
All moving objects possess six degrees of freedom — three linear and three rotary. The task of a linear motion guideway is to eliminate, as closely as possible, five of these degrees of...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
Lasers are now used to micromachine virtually every type of material, including metals, plastics, glass, and ceramics. Micromachining is a highly diverse market that uses flash-pumped,...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
During the 1980s, electronics companies began a two-fold move toward outsourced manufacturing and away from a vertical manufacturing infrastructure to focus on their core...
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Articles: Electronics & Computers
Developing software for small-scale embedded applications is different from developing large-scale software applications. Large-scale applications use commercially available ‘one...
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Articles: Electronics & Computers
While often associated with home automation, the new ZigBee wireless data standard is making fast inroads into industrial, military, and aerospace applications. By supplying...
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Three Reasons Why New Businesses Fail
The Business Briefs series of articles takes you through the basics of developing and presenting a design idea, obtaining funding, protecting and licensing your intellectual property, and getting your ideas to market. This month, learn how to avoid the most common pitfalls that cause a startup business to fail.
Articles: Photonics/Optics
Indium gallium arsenide, or InGaAs, is an alloy of gallium arsenide and indium arsenide. In a more general sense, it belongs to the InGaAsP quaternary system that consists of alloys...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
Partial reflectors in interferometers and polarization-sensitive devices (beam splitters used in reverse) such as beam-splitting cubes are common examples of systems that combine two...
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Articles: Medical
As advances in cellular biology, gene mapping, and other areas of medicine continue, amazing technologies for diagnosing, treating, and even curing diseases are emerging. Specifically,...
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Articles: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
While technology has advanced and there are many new ways to accomplish useful motion within particular applications, electric motors and gearheads are still the preferred and most popular choices for power...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
Nano-optics is a valuably novel class of technology that takes advantage of light’s unique interaction with subwavelength, nano-scale patterned materials, and nanotechnology-enabled fabrication methods to create a broadly...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
Controlled Ultraviolet (UV) laser ablation is a viable method of micro-machining micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and micro-optical-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMS). It enables users to...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
The advantages of cladding pumping fiber lasers were identified early in the research era of fiber laser technology. Essentially, fiber lasers allow efficient brightness conversion from the broad area pump laser diode into a...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
No single image sensor will ever satisfy the diverse requirements of all industrial camera applications. The characteristics of higher resolution, faster speed, and a wide dynamic range are, however, increasingly...
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Articles: Motion Control
Force/Torque (F/T) sensors are critical components of robotic applications in electrical and mechanical assembly, product testing, material handling, and many other applications. A sensor system helps robots verify...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
Many imaging applications in the near-infrared (NIR) region of the spectrum require sensors that see beyond the traditional charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor’s spectral range. A standard uncoated CCD detector...
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