Top TechTop Tech #131: Gravitational Waves, Low-Cost Lidar, Chip Guardians
Important innovations in science and technology
By Paul Worthington
Monday’s Top Tech:
• ESA observing gravitational waves
• New laser for autonomous vehicles
• DARPA designing tiny chip guardians
ESA observing gravitational waves
The European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder will soon take off from French Guiana aboard a Vega rocket.
The mission “will pave the way for future space-based projects to observe gravitational waves,” the ESA says — the “ripples in the fabric of space-time produced by accelerating massive bodies, such as a pair of orbiting black holes.” None have been directly detected so far.
LISA Pathfinder will test the fundamental technologies and instrumentation needed for an observatory: Instruments built to detect tiny perturbations to the fabric of space-time that “must be capable of making exquisitely precise measurements of extremely small changes in distance between two reference objects.”
New laser for autonomous vehicles
A new laser design could dramatically shrink autonomous-vehicle 3-D laser-ranging systems, Kurzweil AI reports.
UC Berkeley engineers say the system can reduce the power consumption, size, weight and cost of LIDAR used in self-driving vehicles.
The self-sweeping laser “couples an optical field with the mechanical motion of a high-contrast grating mirror… that is supported by mechanical springs connected to layers of semiconductor material.”
DARPA designing tiny chip guardians
New tech could safeguard “against an expanding arena of 21st century crime that could threaten the trustworthiness of just about anything with a chip in it—from smart credit cards to engine- controlling automotive computers to F-16 fighter-jet radar systems,” DARPA reports.
Semiconductor chiplets called dielets “could become Lilliputian electronic tamper-watching sentinels affixed to virtually every chip built into commercial and military systems,” DARPA says. “Each dielet will host up to 100,000 transistors and have features and functions remarkable for their scale, among them two-way radio communication, on-board encryption, an energy harvesting function that casts away the need for a battery, and passive sensors for tamper-detection—all the while consuming less than 50 microwatts and costing the equivalent of the portion of a penny occupied by Lincoln’s head.”
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