This National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award (CFDA 47.041 - Engineering) provides $458,725 in funding to the University of California, Irvine for a 5-year project to develop advanced radar technologies. The key products and services to be delivered include: Designing scalable, integrated radar transceivers operating at millimeter-wave and near-terahertz frequencies to enable high-resolution, polarimetric radar sensing capabilities. This includes techniques for precise phase and...
This $497,157 project grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program (CFDA 47.070) aims to co-develop radio frequency (RF) architectures, analog computing algorithms, and compute-in-memory architectures for code-domain, multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems. The project seeks to reimagine the boundary between analog and digital signal processing by moving radar processing operations closer to the RF frontend,...
This National Science Foundation Project Grant award of $274,059 provides funding for Solopulse Corporation to develop a single-pulse radio frequency software suite to improve safety for advanced driver assistance systems. The award falls under the NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program (CFDA 47.084), which seeks to advance research and innovation leading to breakthrough technologies and solutions to national challenges. Specifically, the awardee will develop and test software to...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project award to OSO Semiconductor Inc., a minority-owned small business, will develop a new phased array communication technology to achieve lower power consumption, smaller form factors, and more affordable price targets. The $274,992 grant, awarded on December 15, 2023, will fund the development and testing of an ultra-low loss beamforming circuit that can be integrated into a unique low-power phased...
This Project Grant award of $174,988 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences will support the development of a millimeter-wavelength (mmWave) rapid scan image phased array radar technology demonstrator unit. The objective is to evaluate the feasibility of a future ground-based, mobile phased array cloud radar system that could provide high-resolution measurements of cloud processes, which are crucial for understanding the Earth's climate and...
This $1,200,000 Project Grant was awarded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Program (CFDA 47.070) to the University of Illinois to establish millimeter wave (mmWave) radar as a first-class perception and control tool for small autonomous robots and drones. The project aims to develop new radar-based localization, mapping, and semantic scene understanding capabilities that can operate on the limited onboard compute of small robots...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (CFDA 47.084) Project Grant award of $274,993 to Amrf LLC, a small business located in San Jose, CA, aims to design and develop ultra-wideband beamforming integrated circuits. The project focuses on exploring the feasibility of this innovative radio-frequency fractional Hilbert transformation design theory, with the goal of validating the ultra-wideband beamforming concept, assessing its performance impacts,...
The National Science Foundation awarded a $275,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project Grant to Applied Research Team Inc. of Denver, Colorado under the NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program (CFDA 47.084). The grant will support the development of machine learning algorithms to improve snowpack depth and water content retrieval from C-band and X-band radar data. Accurate snowpack information is critical for water management in the Western U.S., but current retrieval...
The National Science Foundation awarded a $360,000 Project Grant to the University of California, Los Angeles under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to develop frequency-comb-enabled intelligent sensing technology for millimeter-wave and terahertz integrated circuits. Over a three-year period from September 2022 to August 2025, the university will design and test a novel radar device capable of performing broadband coherent detection and sensing from 600 GHz to the terahertz frequency...
This $390,000 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) is focused on developing new technologies to enable high-speed, highly directive wireless data transmission using terahertz (THz) frequencies. The key products to be delivered through this 3-year project include: An amplitude modulator operating at THz frequencies to enable data transmission. A spatial light modulator using micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) to...
SBIR PHASE I: SOFTWARE-DEFINED SUB-TERAHERTZ IMAGING RADAR FOR ALGORITHMIC AGILITY AND ALL-WEATHER TRANSPORTATION SAFETY -THE BROADER/COMMERCIAL IMPACT OF THIS SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION RESEARCH (SBIR) PHASE I PROJECT IS THE DEVELOPMENT OF A UNIVERSAL, AFFORDABLE, AND SUSTAINABLE SENSING SOLUTION TO ENABLE PERIMETER SECURITY AND TRANSPORTATION SAFETY UNDER ALL WEATHER CONDITIONS. CURRENT SENSING SOLUTIONS AVAILABLE TODAY ARE BASED ON A SINGLE MODALITY, EXPENSIVE TO DEPLOY, AND NOT ROBUST TO ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS. CURRENT SOLUTIONS ALSO EMPLOY PROPRIETARY SENSOR PROCESSING INTERFACES, DO NOT PROVIDE THE QUALITY OF DATA NEEDED FOR DECISION-MAKING BY CONTINUOUS LEARNING, ARE HARD TO UPGRADE, AND HAVE POOR SIZE, WEIGHT, AND POWER SPECIFICATIONS. IN CONTRAST, THE PROPOSED TECHNOLOGY LEVERAGES THE STRENGTHS OF MULTIPLE SENSING MODALITIES ON A SINGLE, CONVERGED, OPEN COMPUTE PLATFORM TO ENABLE ROBUST PERCEPTION IN ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS WHILE OFFERING SIGNIFICANT ADVANTAGES TO THE TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP. THE TECHNOLOGY HAS A WIDE RANGE OF APPLICATIONS IN SECTORS AS DIVERSE AS AUTOMOTIVE, ROBOTICS, ENTERPRISE, AEROSPACE, AND DEFENSE. THE SOLUTION DEVELOPED UNDER THIS PROJECT HAS THE POTENTIAL TO SAVE LIVES BY REDUCING THE NUMBER OF ROAD ACCIDENTS, IMPROVING THE DRIVER REACTION TIME, PROTECTING VULNERABLE ROAD USERS SUCH AS PEDESTRIANS AND BICYCLISTS, REDUCING THE DOWNTIME FOR A SHIPPING COMPANY, MINIMIZING THE COSTS ASSOCIATED WITH COLLISION CLAIMS AND REPAIRS, AND DETECTING, CLASSIFYING, ALERTING, AND TRACKING THREATS ON THE GROUND AND IN THE AIR. THIS SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION RESEARCH PHASE I PROJECT DEVELOPS A NOVEL, SCALABLE, CENTRALIZED SENSING PLATFORM AND A MULTI-SPECTRAL SENSOR PROTOTYPE TO REALIZE ULTRA-FINE RESOLUTION IN RANGE, DOPPLER, AZIMUTH, AND ELEVATION DOMAINS USING COMMERCIAL, OFF-THE-SHELF PROCESSING ELEMENTS. ADVANCED COMPRESSION ALGORITHMS ARE EMPLOYED TO TRANSPORT SENSOR MEASUREMENTS OVER SECURE, OPEN, LOW-COST, AND LOW-LATENCY INTERFACES TO THE CENTRALIZED PROCESSING UNIT TO ENABLE MULTI-MODAL SENSOR PROCESSING, EARLY SENSOR FUSION, AND HIGH-DIMENSIONAL PERCEPTION FOR HIGHER-LEVEL DECISION-MAKING. THE DE-COUPLED SENSING AND PROCESSING ARCHITECTURE PRODUCES UNPRECEDENTED ACCESS TO MEASUREMENT-LEVEL DATA TO ENABLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING-BASED ALGORITHMIC DISCOVERY. FALSE-ALARM-CONSTRAINED GLOBAL OBJECT DETECTION ALGORITHMS ARE EMPLOYED TO ENABLE LOCALIZATION, NAVIGATION, AND MAPPING FOR OPERATION UNDER ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS. PROOF-OF-CONCEPT SENSOR HARDWARE IS DEVELOPED WITH LABORATORY AND FIELD EXPERIMENTS TO VALIDATE THE ARCHITECTURE, TECHNOLOGY, ALGORITHMS, AND SOFTWARE. SOME OF THE KEY TECHNOLOGY RISKS ADDRESSED IN THIS PROPOSAL ARE ANTENNA DESIGN AND FABRICATION AT MILLIMETER FREQUENCIES AND ABOVE, CASCADING OF MULTIPLE RADIO FREQUENCY TRANSCEIVERS TO REALIZE A LARGE NUMBER OF SPATIAL CHANNELS, AND HARDWARE-LEVEL SYNCHRONIZATION ACROSS THE SENSORS. THIS AWARD REFLECTS NSF'S STATUTORY MISSION AND HAS BEEN DEEMED WORTHY OF SUPPORT THROUGH EVALUATION USING THE FOUNDATION'S INTELLECTUAL MERIT AND BROADER IMPACTS REVIEW CRITERIA.