COM-0753: Optical noise-free microphone This invention is an innovative method to detect a person's voice while suppressing any background noise. The Optical Noise-Free Microphone (ONFM) is a low-cost, simple and small device that optically detects vibrations directly from the speaker’s skull or from other sound-generating objects such as musical instruments. Read more...
MAE-0935: Miniature cryogenic compressor Thermal imaging devices, mobile sensing platforms and other advanced equipment require miniature compressors. Piezoelectric actuators have many favorable properties, but have not yet been successfully used in miniature compressors, mainly due to small stroke length. Our technology utilizes the piezoelectric phenomenon together with hydraulics to produce an efficient and reliable miniature-sized gas compressor for various uses, including cryogenics. Read more...
COM-1181: Compact direction finding antenna Direction finding antennas have numerous applications; however, the complexity of the technology has its price. The size of such antennas, cost of production and maintenance inhibit the development of various applications. Solutions to these drawbacks are achieved at the cost of performance. Our technology enables high performance, small size and low cost Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) antenna, suitable for existing as well as for new applications. Read more...
COM-0619: Gamma-ray detector Gamma-ray detectors have wide applications in fields such as nuclear medicine, environmental monitoring and material testing. By analyzing emitted rays using a gamma ray spectrometer, diagnostically useful information can be obtained. Some of the methods used for the detection of gamma rays include Geiger counters, scintillation counters, neutron detectors, semiconductor detectors and variants including CCDs. Our invention improves the fabrication process of detectors using an acoustic wave treatment. This allows for improvements such as increased sensitivity and differentiation between energy levels of the detected rays. Read more...
MAE-1057: Self balancing motorcycle Motorcycle riding has always been a dangerous and attention-demanding activity, especially when compared to driving cars and other enclosed vehicles. The motorcycle’s unstable nature makes it vulnerable to road hazards and emergency situations, and the consequences of accidents can be harsh. Our technology enables a motorcycle to balance itself, allowing for major advances in road safety and autonomous robotics. Read more...
CHM-0620: Variable lenslet array Measuring wave front distortions is widely practiced in optics and is essential for adaptive optics, optical shop testing, wafer measurements and other fields. Conventional wave front sensors have difficulty measuring wave fronts under severe conditions such as low light level, fast scale variations, large aberrations, wide dynamic range, both lateral and in depth and discontinuities in the wave front. This unique invention uses a variable lenslet array to sense wave fronts even under these severe conditions and meets this need in a simple and effective way without any mechanical motion. Read more...
COM-1102: CMOS-SOI-MEMS thermal sensors for THz imaging This invention is aimed towards achieving a focal plane array for passive or active imaging in a wide bandwidth of 0.6-1.5THz - by pursuing a new approach and introducing multiple innovations, one of which is based on uncooled thermally isolated CMOS SOI transistors (TeraMOS). Read more...
COM-1253: CMOS-SOI-MEMS thermal antenna for THz thermal imaging Thermal antennas couple thermal radiation to thermal sensors by converting Electromagnetic radiation directly into heat. Applications include THz sensors where the challenge is to achieve high efficient coupling between the thermal radiation irradiating large pixels and the tiny TeraMOS sensor described above. Additional applications include IR pixels where with the present invention the thermal time constant may be reduced significantly. Read more...
COM-1304: Blackbody as a THz emitter and a THz measurement and characterization set-up based on blackbody and THz filters THz radiation bridges the gap between mm-waves and mid/far IR. Until recently, this spectral range has received limited attention due to the lack of efficient and low/moderate cost THz sources and detectors. However, there are a number of promising applications such as THz imaging (concealed weapon and explosive detection) and THz spectroscopy (pharmaceutical, biomedical, and materials inspection applications). Successful exploitation of the potential of THz technology requires the availability of low cost, versatile and powerful THz emitters as well as highly sensitive, un-cooled and small detectors. This invention uses a blackbody apparatus to enable the manufacture of relatively low-cost THz systems to meet these needs. Read more...
CHM-1173: Direct and nondestructive chemical analysis of solid samples Chemical analysis is usually performed in solutions or in the gas phase, while direct detection of solids is much more difficult. This breakthrough spectroscopic method utilizing laser multi-photon ionization (MPI) is performed under ambient conditions and is suitable for direct analysis of solid materials providing rich spectral features that can be used for compound identification. This technology has applications in industrial process control (e.g. semiconductor wafers), in quality assurance (e.g., pharmaceuticals), in forensic applications (e.g., explosives, narcotics) and in several environmental monitoring applications. This novel method has been successfully laboratory-demonstrated and was used for the detection of various organic compounds including explosives, narcotic drugs and polycyclic aromatics. Read more...
MAE-1112: Dilute nitride-based quantum well infrared photodetector Optoelectronic devices operating in the near infrared (NIR) to mid infrared (MIR) spectral range offer a diversity of applications ranging from telecommunications to chemical sensors for pollution detection, chemical forensics, chemical and biological warfare, industrial process monitoring, night vision and even medical diagnostics. However, conventional material systems and IR-detectors do not effectively meet these optical range needs. This invention offers a new type of IR-device in the NIR to MIR range, based on optical transitions to foreign atoms which when inserted into standard active layers in QWIP devices, affect electronic states. Single element devices operating at ~1.5 µm at RT, that were fabricated and tested in our lab, demonstrate high responsivity of ~20 A/W, and signal gain of ~1000 (which is not relevant for the dark current and dark current noise). This new type of device may potentially enable single photon detection at the NIR range. Read more...
MAE-1140: Nitrogen incorporation in atomic layer epitaxy growth of InAsN/GaAs quantum wells In recent years, the dilute nitride alloys (III-V-N) has been the subject of intense theoretical and experimental research effort because of their ability for band gap and band-offset engineering, and thus have potential for a wide range of optoelectronic device applications. By optimizing the nitrogen content, the lattice constant and band-gap energy can be varied over a wide range tailoring the material’s properties to a specific application, such as near-infrared (IR) lasers and quantum-well IR photodetector (QWIP) devices. However, the growth of high-indium-content dilute nitrides using metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD), which is important for such applications, is not straightforward. This laboratory-tested method overcomes this difficulty and allows for the manufacture of high-quality structures tailor-made for specific optical communication devices. Read more...
MAE-1216: Tuneable XBn and nBn and PV infrared detectors The ability to fine-tune the band gap of infrared detectors allows for multispectral imaging, which has many commercial military and civilian applications. However, conventional manufacturing methods are extremely limited in this field. This invention utilizes well-known and well-studied properties of dilute nitrides to utilize PV, nBn and XBn structures and their reduced working temperatures, to retain control over the band-gap energy of the III-V-N semiconductor active layer through control over its composition retaining the lattice-matching constraints. This laboratory proven method can pave the way for lattice-matched, compositionally tunable band gap active layers for infrared detectors with a cut-off wavelength between 3-5 microns or more. Read more...
COM-1295: Three-photon counting by three photon absorption Photon counting is the key enabler of the revolution in experimental quantum optics, as well as for a variety of quantum information applications achieved over the past decade. It also plays an important role in classical applications involving extremely low-light intensities in a wide range of fields including biological imaging and optical communications. Significant efforts have been made to develop photon counters able to detect high photon number states which can provide unique solutions for enhanced-sensitivity metrology and quantum computing. This technology is a sensitive three-photon counter in which input photons are absorbed as triplets by three-photon absorption (3PA) allowing for ultrafast detection of photon triplets and extraction of the temporal shape of a fsec pulse without direction-of-time ambiguity and with no need for spectral measurements. Read more...
COM-1326: Uniform, high fill factor, low DCR single photon avalanche photodiode (SPAD) in a low-voltage 0.18 micron CMOS technology Highly demanding photonic applications require the acquisition of images at very low light-level conditions and at high speed. Only Geiger-mode CMOS imagers in which the sensor in each pixel is a Single Photon Avalanche Photodiode (SPAD) may meet the requirements for exceptional time resolution and ultimate optical sensitivity. However, despite significant progress, Geiger-mode CMOS imagers are still commercially unavailable. Conventional designs are incapable of achieving high fill factor, high PDE, and low DCR. This innovative design utilizes a completely new method to achieve all of the desired properties for this type of imagery. Read more...
COM-1373: Second-order optical coherence tomography Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is advantageous over other biomedical imaging modalities, such as ultrasonography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in terms of resolution. However, it has several inherent limitations which prevent it from taking over from traditional imaging techniques. The most notable of these limitations are: Inability to image fast moving objects (like blood flow), limited penetration of up to 1 to 2 millimeters and slow scanning rates. The presented technology is a new OCT technique based on nonlinear optical effects called Second-Order OCT. The technology offers improved resolution, deeper penetration imaging, faster scanning rates and turbulence free imaging. Read more...
COM-1466: Sub-Nyquist radar via doppler focusing Standard radar systems today sample and digitally process the received signal at its Nyquist rate, this rate can be up to hundreds of MHz and higher for modern systems. The drawback of this approach is that Nyquist rate sampling and processing is not always possible, or its price is too high. The algorithm enables radar receivers to dramatically decrease their hardware requirements, while maintaining the same performance for conventional Nyquist rate sampling and processing for large bandwidths. The technology combines the lower cost of sub-Nyquist sampling and processing, with the Nyquist rate performance. Read more...
COM-1158: Cancer diagnostic probe Effective diagnostics of cancerous cells during oncology surgeries is necessary for a successful treatment. Currently, treatments in these fields often result in repeated surgery which put the patient at risk and are costly. Therefore, providing the surgeon with a device which can accurately identify cancer can save repeated surgery and treatment costs while providing better healthcare. Our technology enables a breakthrough, low-cost and easy to operate device for ensuring the removal of all cancer cells during surgery. Read more...
CHM-1153: Organic transistors Organic electronic components benefit from low-cost and large-area fabrication and flexible and unconventional substrate amenability. Organic Field-Effect Transistors (OFETs) are expected to be integrated in a variety of applications including RFID tags, flexible active matrix displays, and bio-compatible sensors arrays. However, the inherent low mobility of Organic Semiconductors (OSCs) requires high operating voltage and high power consumption which is less than ideal for most applications. This innovative design offers low-cost, high performance, organic switching devices capable of delivering high current densities. Equally important, the unique vertical architecture lends itself to functionalization to light-emitting purposes; such combination offers the exciting possibility of joining light emitting and logic elements in pixels into one device, lowering production costs, freeing up “dark” pixel areas, and increasing operational lifetime. Read more...
