Electronics & Software

Active-pixel-sensor (APS) circuits and perhaps other dense complementary metal oxide/semiconductor (CMOS) very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits would be powered by infrared beams transmitted by laser diodes and received by photodetectors, according to a proposal. Clock signals for...

Three integrated software products are being developed for use in the further development of autopilot systems for reusable launch vehicles (RLVs). The need for these products arises because of the unique nature of RLVs:

Thermoplastic coupling is a patented welding process that is used to join thermoplastic parts. At the drill press, during a connector design brainstorming session, an engineer at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories inserted a plastic rod into a cavity that was slightly too small in its...

Several modifications of the design and operation of lithium-ion rechargeable electrochemical cells have been proposed to prolong the cycle lives of the cells. As explained below, overdischarge can result in dissolution of a metal current collector in the anode of a cell, with consequent...

A Luneberg lens is a microwave lens consisting of a series of concentric shells of differing dielectric constants. The highest dielectric constant, or refractive index, resides at the core and the lowest, at the outer shell. Microwaves passing through this arrangement of shells are focused in the...

The Hybrid Electric Vehicle Analysis (HEVA) computer program numerically simulates the performance of an automotive vehicle -- especially a hybrid vehicle. A vehicle is said to be hybrid if (1) it contains an energy-storage device (a battery, flywheel, or ultra-capacitor) that is charged with...

The Synchronous Parallel Environment for Emulation and Discrete-Event Simulation (SPEEDES) is now using a new general-purpose priority queue data structure called the SPEEDES Qheap for managing its set of pending events in ascending time order. Empirical studies have shown this data structure to...

A proposed wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) optical communication system would feature a single optical fiber carrying eight channels of digital data signals. In the original application, the signal in each channel would be a serial digital video-camera output, but the system could just...

The NLEDIT computer program implements a generic graphical user interface for the preprocessing of FORTRAN namelist input files. The interface consists of a menu system, a message window, a help system, and data-entry forms. A form is generated for each namelist. The form includes an input...