Patents Assigned to National Science Foundation
  • Patent number: 11152796
    Abstract: A method and system for generating inverted electrical signals includes a first string of batteries connected in series, each battery having a half-bridge circuit connected in parallel and each having upper switch and lower switches. A first H-bridge circuit is connected in parallel with the first string of batteries, and a triangle wave generator generates a plurality of triangle wave signals at a given amplitude and carrier frequency. The plurality of triangle wave signals have individual triangle wave signals phase-shifted from one another. A modulation wave generator generates a modulation signal at a modulation amplitude and at twice a fundamental frequency that is less than the carrier frequency. A controller compares an instantaneous magnitude of the individual triangle wave signals to an instantaneous magnitude of the modulation signal, and outputs commands to the upper switch of a respective half-bridge circuit based on the comparison.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 22, 2017
    Date of Patent: October 19, 2021
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Caisheng Wang, Zuhair M. Alaas, Jianfei Chen
  • Patent number: 10724897
    Abstract: This disclosure describes a sensor for detecting vibrations, particularly low-frequency vibrations. The sensor is of a cascaded gapped cantilever construction and may include a single sensing beam extending from a base to a proof mass across the plurality of gaps, a mechanical beam opposite the piezoelectric beam. The sensor may be included in a system including a housing, a support, and electronic components for converting and measuring signal. The sensor may be mounted to an item of furniture, such as a bed or a sofa, and measure physiological data including ballistocardiogram and respiratory data of a subject positioned on the furniture.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 16, 2016
    Date of Patent: July 28, 2020
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Yong Xu, Yating Hu, Hongen Tu
  • Patent number: 10637586
    Abstract: Systems and methods for underwater communication using a MIMO acoustic channel. An acoustic receiver may receive a signal comprising information encoded in at least one transmitted symbol. Using a two-layer iterative process, the at least one transmitted symbol is estimated. The first layer of the two-layer process uses iterative exchanges of soft-decisions between an adaptive turbo equalizer and a MAP decoder. The second layer of the two-layer process uses a data-reuse procedure that adapts an equalizer vector of both a feedforward filter and a serial interference cancellation filter of the adaptive turbo equalizer using a posteriori soft decisions of the at least one transmitted symbol. After a plurality of iterations, a hard decision of the bits encoded on the at least one transmitted symbol is output from the MAP decoder.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 25, 2017
    Date of Patent: April 28, 2020
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Yahong Rosa Zheng, Weimin Duan, Chengshan Xiao
  • Patent number: 10094039
    Abstract: Low-temperature organometallic nucleation and crystallization-based synthesis methods for the fabrication of semiconductor and metal colloidal nanocrystals with narrow size distributions and tunable, size- and shape-dependent electronic and optical properties. Methods include (1) forming a reaction mixture in a reaction vessel under an inert atmosphere that includes at least one solvent, a cationic precursor, an anionic precursor, and at least a first surface stabilizing ligand while stirring at a temperature in a range from about 50° C. to about 130° C. and (2) growing nanocrystals in the reaction mixture for a period of time while maintaining the temperature, the stirring, and the inert-gas atmosphere.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 22, 2016
    Date of Patent: October 9, 2018
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Michael Hans Risbud Bartl, JacQueline T. Siy
  • Patent number: 10013048
    Abstract: The present inventors have recognized that proper utilization of reconfigurable event driven hardware may achieve optimum power conservation in energy constrained environments including a low power general purpose primary processor and one or more electronic sensors. Aspects of neurobiology and neuroscience, for example, may be utilized to provide such reconfigurable event driven hardware, thereby achieving energy-efficient continuous sensing and signature reporting in conjunction with the one or more electronic sensors while the primary processor enters a low power consumption mode. Such hardware is event driven and operates with extremely low energy requirements.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 1, 2016
    Date of Patent: July 3, 2018
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Mikko H. Lipasti, Atif G. Hashmi, Andrew Nere, Giulio Tononi
  • Patent number: 9839890
    Abstract: The invention describes a method for the synthesis of compounds comprising the steps of: (a) compartmentalising two or more sets of primary compounds into microcapsules; such that a proportion of the microcapsules contains two or more compounds; and (b) forming secondary compounds in the microcapsules by chemical reactions between primary compounds from different sets; wherein one or both of steps (a) and (b) is performed under microfluidic control; preferably electronic microfluidic control, The invention further allows for the identification of compounds which bind to a target component of a biochemical system or modulate the activity of the target, and which is co-compartmentalised into the microcapsules.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 12, 2005
    Date of Patent: December 12, 2017
    Assignees: National Science Foundation, Medical Research Council, President and Fellows of Harvard College
    Inventors: Andrew Griffiths, David Weitz, Darren Link, Keunho Ahn, Jerome Bibette
  • Publication number: 20170191920
    Abstract: A method for analyzing porosity of a particle and a medium disposed in the porosity of the particle. A video-holographic microscope is provided to analyze interference patterns produced by providing a laser source to output a collimated beam, scattering the collimated beam off a particle and interacting with an unscattered beam to generate the interference pattern for analyzation to determine the refractive index of the particle and a medium disposed in the porosity of the particle to measure porosity and the medium.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 12, 2016
    Publication date: July 6, 2017
    Applicant: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Fook Chiong Cheong, Ke Xiao, David Pine, David G. Grier
  • Patent number: 9606842
    Abstract: A multi-core processor provides circuitry for jointly scaling the number of operating cores and the amount of resources per core in order to maximize processing performance in a power-constrained environment. Such scaling is advantageously provided without the need for scaling voltage and frequency. Selection of the number of operating cores and the amount of resources per core is made by examining the degree of instruction and thread level parallelism available for a given application. Accordingly, performance counters (and other characteristics) implemented in by a processor may be sampled on-line (in real time) and/or performance counters for a given application may be profiled and characterized off-line. As a result, improved processing performance may be achieved despite decreases in core operating voltages and increases in technology process variability over time.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 8, 2013
    Date of Patent: March 28, 2017
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventor: Nam Sung Kim
  • Patent number: 9577731
    Abstract: The inventors have recognized that in RF communication systems, by switching between transmit antennas of an RF transmitter on a sub-symbol basis (antenna index coding), and/or by adaptively determining how often antenna switching occurs (adaptive antenna hopping), an increased amount of data may be wirelessly transmitted to an RF receiver without significantly increasing energy consumption. The inventors have determined that in certain systems, such as ZigBee, data symbols consist of elementary waveform patterns, and that such waveform patterns for transmit antennas may be stored by an RF receiver for later determining transmit antennas for data symbols. The inventors have also determined that the invention may be applied in the frequency domain, such as to OFDM, by storing subcarrier waveform patterns for particular transmit antennas and later determining transmit antennas for subcarriers of data symbols.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 23, 2015
    Date of Patent: February 21, 2017
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Xinyu Zhang, Sanjib Sur, Teng Wei
  • Patent number: 9571723
    Abstract: There is set forth herein a system including a camera device. In one embodiment the system is operative to perform image processing for detection of an event involving a human subject. There is set forth herein in one embodiment, a camera equipped system employed for fall detection.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 16, 2012
    Date of Patent: February 14, 2017
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Senem Velipasalar, Akhan Almagambetov, Mauricio Casares
  • Patent number: 9520207
    Abstract: Both single phase lead-free cubic pyrochlore bismuth zinc niobate (BZN)-based dielectric materials with a chemical composition of Bi1.5Zn(0.5+y)Nb(1.5?x)Ta(x)O(6.5+y), with 0?x<0.23 and 0?y<0.9 and films with these average compositions with Bi2O3 particles in an amorphous matrix and a process of manufacture thereof. The crystalline BZNT-based dielectric material has a relative permittivity of at least 120, a maximum applied electric field of at least 4.0 MV/cm at 10 kHz, a maximum energy storage at 25° C. and 10 kHz of at least 50 J/cm3 and a maximum energy storage at 200° C. and 10 kHz of at least 22 J/cm3. The process is a wet chemical process that produces thin films of Bi1.5Zn(0.5+y)Nb(1.5?x)Ta(x)O(6.5+y) without the use of 2-methoxyethanol and pyridine.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 11, 2015
    Date of Patent: December 13, 2016
    Assignees: The Penn State University, National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Elizabeth K. Michael, Susan Trolier-McKinstry
  • Patent number: 9244772
    Abstract: A computer architecture allows for simplified recovery after mis-speculation during speculative execution by controlling speculation to occur within idempotent regions that may be recovered by re-execution of the region without the need for restoring complex state information from checkpoints. A compiler for increasing the size of idempotent regions is also disclosed.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 4, 2011
    Date of Patent: January 26, 2016
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Karthikeyan Sankaralingam, Marc Asher De Kruijf, Chen-Han Ho
  • Patent number: 9200294
    Abstract: The present application provides Brassica INDEHISCENT1 (BIND) sequences.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 16, 2012
    Date of Patent: December 1, 2015
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Martin F. Yanofsky, Sherry Kempin
  • Patent number: 9187823
    Abstract: A method of growing carbon nanostructures on a conductive substrate without the need for a vacuum or low-pressure environment provides high electrical field strengths to generate the necessary carbon ions from a feedstock gas and to promote alignment and separation of the resulting structures. In one embodiment, substantially uniform “vertical” nanostructures may be formed around the periphery of an extended wire for use in corona discharge applications or the like. Growth on a planar substrate may provide use with a variety of apparatus requiring a high specific surface conductor such as capacitors, batteries, and solar cells.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 7, 2012
    Date of Patent: November 17, 2015
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Junhong Chen, Kehan Yu, Zheng Bo, Guahua Lu
  • Patent number: 8941816
    Abstract: Embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to positioning for geophysical sensing and provide a method, system and apparatus for rotary laser positioning in geophysical sensing. In an embodiment of the invention, a geophysical sensing data processing system can be provided to include multiple laser energy sources disposed about a target scene, and a mobile sensor unit. The mobile sensor unit can include at least one laser energy source sensor coupled to a laser positioning system, and one or multiple geophysical sensor communicatively linked to the laser positioning system. In one aspect of the invention, the laser positioning system can be a Rotary Laser Positioning System (RLPS). Complementary positioning sensors further can be provided.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 2, 2006
    Date of Patent: January 27, 2015
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventor: Mark Grasmueck
  • Publication number: 20150002191
    Abstract: The invention relates to hardware decoders that efficiently expand a small number of input bits to a large number of output bits, while providing considerable flexibility in selecting the output instances. One main area of application of the invention is in pin-limited environments, such as field programmable gates array (FPGA) used with dynamic reconfiguration. The invention includes a mapping unit that is a circuit, possibly in combination with a reconfigurable memory device. The circuit has as input a z-bit source word having a value at each bit position and it outputs an n-bit output word, where n>z, where the value of each bit position of the n-bit output word is based upon the value of a pre-selected hardwired one of the bit positions in the x-bit word, where the said pre-selected hardwired bit positions is selected by a selector address.
    Type: Application
    Filed: September 5, 2014
    Publication date: January 1, 2015
    Applicant: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Ramachandran Vaidyanathan, Matthew Jordan
  • Patent number: 8653330
    Abstract: Compounds, methods for producing them and methods for varying the morphology of plants are disclosed. More particularly, a SUN gene can be used to alter the shape of fruit in a plant such as a tomato plant.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 19, 2008
    Date of Patent: February 18, 2014
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventor: Esther van der Knaap
  • Patent number: 8521488
    Abstract: An algorithm is disclosed for constructing nonlinear models from high-dimensional scattered data. The algorithm progresses iteratively adding a new basis function at each step to refine the model. The placement of the basis functions is driven by a statistical hypothesis test that reveals geometric structure when it fails. At each step the added function is fit to data contained in a spatio-temporally defined local region to determine the parameters, in particular, the scale of the local model. The proposed method requires no ad hoc parameters. Thus, the number of basis functions required for an accurate fit is determined automatically by the algorithm. The approach may be applied to problems including modeling data on manifolds and the prediction of financial time-series. The algorithm is presented in the context of radial basis functions but in principle can be employed with other methods for function approximation such as multi-layer perceptrons.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 10, 2011
    Date of Patent: August 27, 2013
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Michael J. Kirby, Arthur A. Jamshidi
  • Patent number: 8445188
    Abstract: A photolithography method of patterning photoresist involves disposing a two-dimensional array of focusing particles of spherical or other shape on the photoresist and illuminating the particles on the photoresist to generate deep, sub-wavelength patterns on the photoresist. When developed, a positive photoresist layer generates a two-dimensional array of micro- or nano-holes on the developed photoresist. When developed, a negative photoresist layer generates a two-dimensional array of micro- or nano-pillars on the developed photoresist.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 14, 2009
    Date of Patent: May 21, 2013
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventor: Hooman Mohseni
  • Patent number: 8069015
    Abstract: Systems and methods for signal analysis are described. The method can include digitizing a signal modulated by a pseudo noise (PN) sequence, dividing the digitized signal into a plurality of sample blocks, and estimating a PN phase embedded in a sample block of the plurality of sample blocks using an iterative message passing algorithm (iMPA) executed on a redundant graphical model.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 20, 2007
    Date of Patent: November 29, 2011
    Assignee: National Science Foundation
    Inventors: Keith M. Chugg, On Wa Yeung