Electrical/​Electronics

An improved charge-termination technique has been developed to obtain a more accurate balance between charge and discharge of rechargeable lithium-ion-based electrochemical cells and batteries. The technique has been demonstrated experimentally and is now in use in a laboratory battery...

An algorithm that can discover potentially interesting objects in image data has been formulated and implemented in software. The algorithm is intended for applications in which the target objects are mathematically ill-defined and/or not known or specified in advance. Potential applications include...

An Automated Test Case Generator computer program generates parameter-based test cases for testing software and hardware systems. Given N parameters — each of which represents a kind of variation for testing — and a finite set of possible values for each parameter, the program generates individual...

An article discusses anticipated advances in the design of increasingly capable integrated circuits containing ever smaller electronic devices. The article emphasizes the emergence of technology computer-aided design (TCAD) — a discipline in which computer-aided design is combined with computational...

Some improvements have been made in an instrument designed expressly for recording lightning-induced transient voltages on power and signal cables. The instrument as it existed prior to the improvements was described in "Fast Transient-Voltage Recorder" (KSC-11991), NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 23, No....

A report describes the NASA Spacecraft Transponding Modem (STM) — a spacecraft transponder now under development for planned use on deep-space missions scheduled for launch in the year 2003. In comparison with a traditional deep-space transponder, the STM will be smaller and less power hungry; the reductions...

The design of a highly reliable controller for a digital data bus incorporates improvements, in both hardware and software, over the basic design of a low-speed, low-power, serial bus known in the industry as "I2C." ("I2C" signifies "inter integrated circuit bus" — a bus developed by Philips...

An Airfield Wind Advisory System (AWAS) includes a self-contained weather station, located at an airfield, that measures speed and direction of the wind, the temperature, the barometric pressure, and the humidity. This ground station digitizes these measurements and transmits the measurement data...

The Black Jack (BJ) receiver is the revolutionary flight Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver developed by NASA to fill future needs for orbit-based GPS science. These range from a receiver to determine precise (1-cm radial accuracy goal for JASON-1) orbits, to missions using the GPS signals for remote sensing of the...