Photonics/​Optics

Bringing Multispectral Imaging to Industrial Applications

A mere 20 years ago, machine vision system designers did all they could to avoid color imaging applications due to higher costs and greater system and software complexity. But as...

Lens-Free Fluorescent Microscope

Rice engineers have developed a wide-field microscope thinner than a credit card, small enough to sit on a fingertip and capable of micrometer resolution over a volume of several cubic millimeters.

Taking It to the Streets: Designing Streetlamp Optical Components

The task of creating a streetlamp optical system has changed over the last 20 years and due to this change, so has optical design software. Let’s compare the task of designing...

Rethinking FPGAs for Smart Cameras

The term “smart camera” has been used for decades, but there has been little agreement on the actual definition. This article will use the term “smart” as the Merriam Webster dictionary defines it: the...

Seeing the Brain’s Electrical Activity

Neurons in the brain communicate via rapid electrical impulses that allow the brain to coordinate behavior, sensation, thoughts, and emotion. Scientists who want to study this electrical activity usually...

Military Optics Technology

The demand for innovative solutions to enhance the safety of military personnel is continually on the rise. This includes the need to improve the performance of military vehicles and aircraft, in terms of both safety...

Principles of Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopes

Today’s high-resolution laser scanning confocal microscopes (LSCM), also referred to simply as laser scanning microscopes, are powerful high-magnification surface metrology instruments with a...

Solving a Problem that Plagues Scanning Tunneling Microscopes

Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have solved a longstanding problem that has been plaguing the scanning tunneling microscope for more than 35 years: How to prevent...

Eyes in the Sky: Using Optical Filters to Observe and Measure Earth From a Different Perspective

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it....

Imaging Flexible DNA ‘Building Blocks’ in 3-D

Over the past decade, researchers have been working to create nanoscale materials and devices using DNA as construction materials through a process called DNA origami. A single long “sca...

New Products

Trilinear Line Scan Cameras Teledyne e2v (Milpitas, CA) has announced its next generation of line scan cameras — the high-resolution ELiiXA+ trilinear color range. These new 8k pixel cameras are suited for industrial applications...

Volumetric 3D Printing

While additive manufacturing (AM), commonly known as 3D printing, is enabling engineers and scientists to build parts in configurations and designs never before possible, the impact of the technology has been limited by...

Products of Tomorrow

This column presents technologies that have applications in commercial areas, possibly creating the products of tomorrow. To learn more about each technology, see the contact information provided for that innovation.

3D-Printed Biomaterials Degrade on Demand

Stereolithography — a method of 3D printing — uses an ultraviolet laser controlled by a computer-aided design system to trace patterns across the surface of a photoactive polymer solution. The light...

Ultra-High-Temperature Polymer Additive Manufacturing

Polymer matrix composites are extremely attractive to researchers working on next-generation applications due to their lightweight properties and ability to withstand extreme conditions in...

Laser Technique Writes Graphene Patterns on Most Surfaces

Laser-induced graphene (LIG) has been used to write graphene patterns onto food and other materials to quickly embed conductive identification tags and sensors into the products...

Positional Sensor Measures Rotational and Lateral Displacements

Positional sensors have applications where a very accurate measurement of position is needed over a limited range. One example of such an application is in manipulation of a stage...

Real-Time Airborne Particle Analyzer

Particle analysis is useful for determining chemical compositions in a wide range of disciplines, from ascertaining the source of a petroleum sample to duplicating a fragrance. The technique is appealing to...

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Established in 1943, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico was site Y of the Manhattan Project for a single purpose: to design and build an atomic bomb, which took just 27 months. The Los Alamos of...

Integrating Optical Components into Existing Chip Designs

Moving from electrical communication to optical communication is attractive to chip manufacturers because it could significantly increase chips’ speed and reduce power consumption, an...

Fabrication Process Produces Nanostructures for Electronic Devices

Demands for improved computer processing power have led researchers to explore both new processes and other materials beyond silicon to produce electronic components....

New on the Market: June 2018

Laser Sensors The optoNCDT 1750 laser sensors from Micro-Epsilon, Raleigh, NC, feature measuring ranges of 500 and 750 mm for fast, high-precision measurement tasks that require large measuring ranges. They are...

Transistor Material Provides Additional Computing Degrees of Freedom

For several decades, improvements in conventional transistor materials have been sufficient to sustain Moore’s Law — the historical pattern of microchip manufacturers...

Composite Film Enables Windows that Switch from Transparent to Color

Commercial buildings in the United States account for nearly 40% of the total energy consumption. Among them, electricity is the largest energy source for buildings....

Paired Sleep Tracker and Light Therapy Tools Retrain Circadian Rhythms

Spinoff is NASA’s annual publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercialization has contributed to the development of products and...

How Sophisticated Wearable Sensors are Changing Healthcare

In the traditional model of healthcare, a patient would visit a doctor regularly for checkups or for evaluations when there’s an ailment. This model, however, isn’t ideal for...

Photonic Biosensors Could Lead to Fast, Super-Accurate Diagnostics and Detection

A team at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering has made a discovery that could lead to Star Trek-like biosensor devices capable of flagging the...

New Products

CMOS Linear Image Sensor The S13774 from Hamamatsu Corporation (Hamamatsu City, Japan; Bridgewater, NJ), is a CMOS linear image sensor developed for industrial cameras that require high-speed scanning. The column-parallel readout...