Trekking Through That Valley of Death--Sandia Technology

June / July 2005 By: Margaret Lovell Volume 3 Number 3

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If you think of the proof-of-principle of a new technology as one mountain peak and the successful commercialization of that technology as another peak, then the space representing the period of time between those two peaks can be seen as a valley. This period in the transition from discovery to market is littered with the good ideas that never made the climb up and out of the valley. In technology commercialization parlance, this graveyard of inventions is known as the Valley of Death.

Like all scientific organizations with a mission to transfer technologies to the public sector, Sandia has left its share of R&D creations in the valley. But like the other really good research institutions, Sandia also has a number of technologies that have made it through the valley and to the marketplace.

The path of one of Sandia's successes, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), began over 20 years ago with funding from the Department of Energy's Defense Programs, a number of Department of Defense agencies, including the Navy and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and Sandia's internally administered, DOE-funded Laboratory Directed Research and Development program. In the early 1990s, private industry began providing additional support for the development of a commercial product. It was not until the mid-1990s, though, that the technology matured to a level that offered sufficient benefits to defense industry corporations to encourage them to make substantial investments at Sandia in this ground-breaking, all-weather imaging system.

As a result of Sandia's sustained program of research and development on SAR, several state-of-the-art systems have been provided to various DoD operational units, either from Sandia directly or through a corporate strategic partner.
These systems, which have earned recognition for their exceptional performance and utility, are deployed in various critical and time-urgent national security missions, including direct support of Joint Forge in Bosnia, Enduring Freedom in Iraq and homeland defense activities.

The latest SAR development to survive the Valley of Death and which is poised to attain commercial status is the mini-SAR. At about 25 pounds, the mini-SAR is one-fourth the weight and one-tenth the volume of its predecessors currently flying on larger unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), such as General Atomics' Predator. The new mini-SAR has similar capabilities as its larger cousins, including the ability to take high-resolution (four-inch) images through weather, at night and in dust storms. The only difference will be range. The larger SAR can produce an image in the 35 kilometer range due to its larger antenna and higher transmitter power, compared to the mini-SAR, which has a range of about 15 kilometers, which is more than adequate for small UAV military reconnaissance applications.

Future versions of mini-SAR are planned that will shrink the total weight to less than 10 pounds by leveraging both in-development and yet-to-be developed Sandia microsystems technologies. "There are several technologies that may help reduce size and weight to enhance mini-SAR," says Charles Sullivan, who manages Sandia's Radio Frequency (RF) Microsystems Technology department. One is an RF switching device, using MEMS, that can create phase shifts or time delays along an array of antennas. These phase shifters have the affect of "tilting" the phase, which alters the direction of the array's beam, Sullivan explains. "We have more freedom to put the antenna where we want and reduce the size of the overall system," Sullivan says.

Also being studied are solid-state power amplifiers built with materials such as gallium nitride (GaN). The goal of these devices is to realize high output microwave power at high efficiency to replace the vacuum tubes and modules currently used. This should also reduce the size of the radar. MEMS technology approaches, such as micro-channel heat-pipes, are being looked at to help manage the heat spread from these solid-state devices. As RF MEMS and GaN technologies become available, they will be integrated into even smaller versions of Sandia SARs.

Funding and collaborative support for these enhancements will come from both government agencies and private industry. Perhaps not every good idea to come from Sandia's SAR research programs will survive the trek through the Valley of Death, but Sandia and its partners have shown that for SAR and many other technologies, an integrated lab/industry team provides the best chance for successfully navigating the turbulent waters from discovery to market.

Margaret Lovell is a senior technical writer at Technically Write, assigned to Sandia National Laboratories.