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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 235 records · Page 13
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2013

Automated, Ultra-Sterile Solid Sample Handling and Analysis on a Chip

There are no existing ultra-sterile lab-on-a-chip systems that can accept solid samples and perform complete chemical analyses without human intervention. The proposed solution is to demonstrate completely automated lab-on-a-chip manipulation of powdered solid samples, followed by on-chip liquid extraction and chemical analysis. This technology utilizes a newly invented glass micro-device for solid manipulation, which mates with existing lab-on-a-chip instrumentation. Devices are fabricated in a Class 10 cleanroom at the JPL MicroDevices Lab, and are plasma-cleaned before and after assembly. Solid samples enter the device through a drilled hole in the top. Existing micro-pumping technology is used to transfer milligrams of powdered sample into an extraction chamber where it is mixed with liquids to extract organic material. Subsequent chemical analysis is performed using portable microchip capillary electrophoresis systems (CE). These instruments have been used for ultra-highly sensitive (parts-per-trillion, pptr) analysis of organic compounds including amines, amino acids, aldehydes, ketones, carboxylic acids, and thiols. Fully autonomous amino acid analyses in liquids were demonstrated; however, to date there have been no reports of completely automated analysis of solid samples on chip. This approach utilizes an existing portable instrument that houses optics, high-voltage power supplies, and solenoids for fully autonomous microfluidic sample processing and CE analysis with laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) detection. Furthermore, the entire system can be sterilized and placed in a cleanroom environment for analyzing samples returned from extraterrestrial targets, if desired. This is an entirely new capability never demonstrated before. The ability to manipulate solid samples, coupled with lab-on-a-chip analysis technology, will enable ultraclean and ultrasensitive end-to-end analysis of samples that is orders of magnitude more sensitive than the ppb goal given in the Science Instruments.

Mora, Maria F.↗
NASA NTRS2012

Fabrication of Silicon Backshort Assembly for Waveguide-Coupled Superconducting Detectors

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is a ground-based instrument that will measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background to search for gravitational waves from a posited epoch of inflation early in the universe s history. We are currently developing detectors that address the challenges of this measurement by combining the excellent beam-forming attributes of feedhorns with the low-noise performance of Transition-Edge sensors. These detectors utilize a planar orthomode transducer that maps the horizontal and vertical linear polarized components in a dual-mode waveguide to separate microstrip lines. On-chip filters define the bandpass in each channel, and the signals are terminated in resistors that are thermally coupled to the transition-edge sensors operating at 150 mK.

Crowe, E.↗
NASA NTRS2013

NASA Tech Briefs, August 2013

Topics covered include: Radial Internal Material Handling System (RIMS) for Circular Habitat Volumes; Conical Seat Shut-Off Valve; Impact-Actuated Digging Tool for Lunar Excavation; Flexible Mechanical Conveyors for Regolith Extraction and Transport; Remote Memory Access Protocol Target Node Intellectual Property; Soft Decision Analyzer; Distributed Prognostics and Health Management with a Wireless Network Architecture; Minimal Power Latch for Single-Slope ADCs; Bismuth Passivation Technique for High-Resolution X-Ray Detectors; High-Strength, Super-elastic Compounds; Cu-Cr-Nb-Zr Alloy for Rocket Engines and Other High-Heat- Flux Applications; Microgravity Storage Vessels and Conveying-Line Feeders for Cohesive Regolith; CRUQS: A Miniature Fine Sun Sensor for Nanosatellites; On-Chip Microfluidic Components for In Situ Analysis, Separation, and Detection of Amino Acids; Spectroscopic Determination of Trace Contaminants in High-Purity Oxygen; Method of Separating Oxygen From Spacecraft Cabin Air to Enable Extravehicular Activities; Atomic Force Microscope Mediated Chromatography; Sample Analysis at Mars Instrument Simulator; Access Control of Web- and Java-Based Applications; Tool for Automated Retrieval of Generic Event Tracks (TARGET); Bilayer Protograph Codes for Half-Duplex Relay Channels; Influence of Computational Drop Representation in LES of a Droplet-Laden Mixing Layer.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2013

Enabling Microliquid Chromatography by Microbead Packing of Microchannels

The microbead packing is the critical element required in the success of on-chip microfabrication of critical microfluidic components for in-situ analysis and detection of chiral amino acids. In order for microliquid chromatography to occur, there must be a stationary phase medium within the microchannel that interacts with the analytes present within flowing fluid. The stationary phase media are the microbeads packed by the process discussed in this work. The purpose of the microliquid chromatography is to provide a lightweight, low-volume, and low-power element to separate amino acids and their chiral partners efficiently to understand better the origin of life. In order to densely pack microbeads into the microchannels, a liquid slurry of microbeads was created. Microbeads were extracted from a commercially available high-performance liquid chromatography column. The silica beads extracted were 5 microns in diameter, and had surface coating of phenyl-hexyl. These microbeads were mixed with a 200- proof ethanol solution to create a microbead slurry with the right viscosity for packing. A microfilter is placed at the outlet via of the microchannel and the slurry is injected, then withdrawn across a filter using modified syringes. After each injection, the channel is flushed with ethanol to enhance packing. This cycle is repeated numerous times to allow for a tightly packed channel of microbeads. Typical microbead packing occurs in the macroscale into tubes or channels by using highly pressurized systems. Moreover, these channels are typically long and straight without any turns or curves. On the other hand, this method of microbead packing is completed within a microchannel 75 micrometers in diameter. Moreover, the microbead packing is completed into a serpentine type microchannel, such that it maximizes microchannel length within a microchip. Doing so enhances the interactions of the analytes with the microbeads to separate efficiently amino acids and amino acid enantiomers.

Balvin, Manuel↗
NASA NTRS1995

Application of New Technology to Future Celestial Trackers

New developments in image sensors and optical materials have opened the door to dramatic mass and power reductions in celestial tracker designs. The rapid development of active pixel sensors (APS) has provided a new detector choice offering high on-chip integration of support circuitry at reduced power consumption. Silicon-Carbide (Si-C) optics are one of the new developments in low-mass optical components. We describe the celestial tracker needs of an Autonomous Feature and Star Tracking (AFAST) system designed for autonomous spacecraft control. Details of a low mass celestial tracker, based on a low power APS array and optimized for an AFAST system, are discussed.

active↗
NASA NTRS1996

Programmable Multiresolution CMOS Active Pixel Sensor

CMOS active pixel sensors (APS) allow the flexibility of placing signal processing circuitry on the imaging focal plane. The multiresolution CMOS APS can perform block averaging on-chip to eliminate the off-chip software intensive image processing. This 128 x 128 APS array can be read out at any user-defined resolution by configuring a set of digital shift registers. The resolution frame rate is 30 Hz with higher rates for all other image resolutions.

APS↗
NASA NTRS1993

Application of the Active Pixel Sensor Concept to Guidance and Navigation

Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) have been used extensively in the past in star trackers and fine guidance systems. A new technology, the active pixel sensor, is a possible successor to CCDs. This technology potentially features the same sensitivity and performance of the CCD with additional improvements. These improvements include random access capability, easy window-of-interest readout, non-destructive readout for signal-to-noise improvement, high radiation tolerance, simplified clocking voltages, and easy integration with other on-chip signal processing circuitry. The state-of-the-art of this emerging technology and its potential application to guidance and navigation systems is discussed.

Eisenman, Allan R.↗
NASA NTRS1996

256X256 CMOS Active Pixel Sensor Camera-on-a-Chip

A CMOS imaging sensor is described that uses active pixel sensor (APS) technology which permits the integration of the detector array with on-chip timing, control and signal chain electronics. This sensor has been used to implement a CMOS APS camera-on-a-chip.

active↗
NASA NTRS2012

Design and Operation of the Planetary In-Situ Capillary Electrophoresis System (PISCES)

The PISCES instrument is a portable, miniature, modular instrument designed to analyze organic molecular signatures of life. PISCES uses microcapillary electrophoresis (μCE) with laser-induced fluorescence detection (LIFD) to analyze fluorescently-labeled analytes prepared on a multi-layer microfluidic chip. As a modular instrument composed of five independently functioning units, each module can be easily detached from the system and used for subsystem testing in different environments, e.g. low temperature. The pneumatic module contains mechanical and electrical components necessary to control pneumatically-actuated valves for on-chip sample processing. A prototype LabVIEW program and two custom printed circuit boards (PCBs) operate the pneumatics module using an Arduino microcontroller, and a tentative design for the module’s housing has been developed. The high-voltage module contains circuitry required to apply varying electrical potentials to the electrophoretic channel of the microdevice. Work is currently being done to design the circuit and PCB for this module in collaboration with our SBIR partners at Los Gatos Research. The optical electronics module contains the spectrometer, laser, and laser power supply. The mounting components for the electronics and housing for the module have been designed, assembled, and tested. The optical module contains optical components to focus the laser to a 20μm spot in the center of the electrophoretic channel.The housing for this module has been designed and assembled with the aligned optical components inside.

Willis, Peter A.↗
DOE OSTI2025

A Synthesis Methodology for Intelligent Memory Interfaces in Accelerator Systems

Domain-specific systems improve the performance of a specific set of applications compared to general-purpose processing systems by deploying custom hardware accelerators. These hardware accelerators are generated using high-level synthesis (HLS) tools. The HLS tools enable a comprehensive design space exploration to optimize the compute performance of the generated accelerators. However, they often ignore the challenges of implementing the accelerators in a system-on-chip, particularly how the accelerators access memory. Our work introduces a buffering system design that improves accelerators' memory accesses by intelligently employing burst transactions to prefetch useful data from external memory to on-chip local buffers. Our design is dynamic, parametric, and transparent to the accelerators generated by HLS tools. We derive the buffering system parameters using appropriate compiler-based analysis passes and memory channel latency constraints. The proposed buffering system design results in, on average, 8.8x performance improvements while lowering memory channel utilization on average by 53.2% for a set of PolyBench kernels.

Limaye, Ankur M. (ORCID:0000000194062584)↗
DOE OSTI2025

Design and Performance of the SPT-SLIM Receiver Cryostat

The South Pole Telescope Shirokoff Line Intensity Mapper (SPT-SLIM) is a millimeter-wavelength line-intensity mapping experiment, which was deployed on the South Pole Telescope (SPT) during the 2024-2025 Austral summer season. This pathfinder experiment serves to demonstrate the on-sky operation of multi-pixel on-chip spectrometer technology. We report on the cryogenic performance of the SPT-SLIM receiver for the first year of commissioning observations. The SPT-SLIM receiver utilizes an Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator (ADR) for cooling the focal plane of superconducting filterbank spectrometers to a temperature of 150 mK. We demonstrate stable thermal performance of the focal plane module during observations consistent with thermal modeling, enabling a cryogenic operating efficiency above 80%. We also report on the receiver control system design utilizing the Observatory Control System (OCS) platform for automated cryogenic operation on the SPT.

Young, M. R. [Fermilab; Chicago U., KICP]↗
DOE OSTI2025

An On-Sky Atmospheric Calibration of SPT-SLIM

We present the methodology and results of the on-sky responsivity calibration of the South Pole Telescope Shirokoff Line Intensity Mapper (SPT-SLIM). SPT-SLIM is a pathfinder line intensity mapping experiment utilizing the on-chip spectrometer technology, and was first deployed during the 2024-2025 Austral Summer season on the South Pole Telescope. During the two-week on-sky operation of SPT-SLIM, we performed periodic measurements of the detector response as a function of the telescope elevation angle. Combining these data with atmospheric opacity measurements from an on-site atmospheric tipping radiometer, simulated South Pole atmospheric spectra, and measured detector spectral responses, we construct estimates for the responsivity of SPT-SLIM detectors to sky loading. We then use this model to calibrate observations of the moon taken by SPT-SLIM, cross-checking the result against the known brightness temperature of the Moon as a function of its phase.

Dibert, K. R. [Chicago U., Astron. Astrophys. Ctr.↗
DOE OSTI2025

Obsidian

Obsidian A35 is a compact FPGA carrier board designed to interface with ADCs, DACs or other devices, either stand-alone or as an I/O expansion board. The connectivity includes 1 GigE, 4 SFP, 6 PMOD, FTDI USB and Arduino shield compatible header. The board features also a FPGA boot SPI Flash, on-chip DDR3 memory, VCXO and White Rabbit compatibility.

Moore, Victoria [Lawrence Berkeley National Labora↗
DOE OSTI2026

A Sub-electron-noise Skipper-CCD Readout ASIC with Improved Channel-to-channel Isolation and an Integrated Cryogenic Voltage Reference

The MIDNA application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are a series of skipper-CCD readout chips fabricated in a 65 nm low-power CMOS process that implement a correlated double sampling signal processing chain based on dual-slope integrators. They are capable of working from room to cryogenic temperatures, down to 84 K. The present iteration of the ASIC has been fabricated including several design updates and the addition of an on-chip voltage reference, resulting in improved performance. This work presents the main vulnerabilities solved, the changes carried out, and the resulting performance benefits. Measurements with a skipper-CCD and the ASIC at 140 K showed that the single-electron resolution can be reached by averaging the measured charge in the analog domain using the analog pile-up technique with a readout noise as low as 0.11 erms of equivalent charge for 1200 samples. The channel-to-channel crosstalk was also characterized showing values better than -62 dB.

Alcalde Bessia, Fabricio↗
DOE OSTI2026

A Sub-electron-noise Skipper-CCD Readout ASIC with Improved Channel-to-channel Isolation and an Integrated Cryogenic Voltage Reference

The MIDNA application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are a series of skipper-CCD readout chips fabricated in a 65 nm low-power CMOS process that implement a correlated double sampling signal processing chain based on dual-slope integrators. They are capable of working from room to cryogenic temperatures, down to 84 K. The present iteration of the ASIC has been fabricated including several design updates and the addition of an on-chip voltage reference, resulting in improved performance. This work presents the main vulnerabilities solved, the changes carried out, and the resulting performance benefits. Measurements with a skipper-CCD and the ASIC at 140 K showed that the single-electron resolution can be reached by averaging the measured charge in the analog domain using the analog pile-up technique with a readout noise as low as 0.11 erms of equivalent charge for 1200 samples. The channel-to-channel crosstalk was also characterized showing values better than -62 dB.

Alcalde Bessia, Fabricio↗
DOE OSTI2026

A 3D-Printed Millimeter-Wave Inline Waveguide-to-Coplanar-Waveguide Transition to Enable Dense Spectrometer Arrays for Intensity Mapping Surveys

We present a 3D-printed millimeter-wave, octave-bandwidth, in-line waveguide-to-coplanar-waveguide transition designed to enable focal planes with dense arrays of on-chip spectrometers. These arrays will enable compelling surveys of the large-scale structure of the universe through millimeter-wave intensity mapping. The transition consists of a four-step ridge-waveguide transformer that couples light from a rectangular waveguide onto a coplanar waveguide via an electrical connection made with indium bump bonds. We develop a tolerance-aware optimization approach to identify high-performance transition geometries that are robust to manufacturing variations; the same formulation can be applied to other tolerance-sensitive design problems. We also describe the implementation of a custom apparatus and procedure for bump-bonding a silicon chip to a metallized 3D-printed component. We detail the fabrication of the coplanar waveguide chip and three-dimensional waveguide structure, simulations and metrology of a test device, and room temperature reflectance measurements of this device. The room temperature metrology and reflection measurements are consistent with a model that predicts a coupling efficiency of $\mathord{\sim} 95\%$ at cryogenic temperatures in the 85-170 GHz frequency range.

Stover, Austin [Chicago U.; Chicago U., KICP] (ORC↗
NASA NTRS2003

Switch array system for thin film lithium microbatteries

This paper presents a design approach for charging and discharging microbatteries. Maximum flexibility in terms of voltages and currents are also obtained through the use of a switching matrix.

microbattery on-chip power micropower↗