Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer

Sandia Technology Leads to Virtual Video Game Tool
Largely based on technology originally developed at Sandia National Laboratories, the Novint Falcon from Novint Technologies, Inc., based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is a small robot that allows users to feel weight, shape, texture, dimension, dynamics, and force effects when playing video games. Instead of using mouse clicks and meters, players feel the weight of a basketball as they shoot it toward a hoop, the momentum and impact as they swing a virtual golf club and strike a ball, the recoil of a weapon, and the characteristics of virtual objects and environments. Due to the universal nature of the volumetric and surface 3-D data handled by these applications, the underlying technology and applications have been used in other areas, such as medicine, design and manufacturing.

Enhancing Agriculture Productivity with a Natural Metabolite
Today's agricultural growers face daunting barriers to the profitable production of crops to feed the world's exploding population. Urban development and population growth compete with agriculture for land and water, thereby increasing the cost of both resources while limiting the areas available to growers. These circumstances necessitate more production per acre at the same time consumers are demanding higher quality produce, preferably organic or pesticide-free. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) researcher Pat Unkefer and her team were investigating carbon and nitrogen metabolism in plants when they discovered a natural plant metabolite, an amino acid that coordinates two vital processes: nitrogen uptake and photosynthesis. The metabolite accelerates growth, thereby enhancing total biomass and crop yield without the use of growth hormones or additional fertilizers. The metabolite was developed for use on multiple food and nonfood crops, including vegetables, fruits, ornamentals, turf, grains, and biomass (plants that can be burned as fuel or used as quick-growing groundcover in areas damaged by mining or wildfire). LANL exclusively licensed the technology to Biagro Western of Visalia, California, for commercialization. Biagro branded the metabolite product Take-Off™.

AFRL Collaborates for Cost-Effective Commercial Electronics
The Single-upset Event Immune Reconfigurable (SIRF) Program team at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Kirtland Air Force Base, and Xilinx, Inc., collaborated to develop a space-hardened, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip combining AFRL-pioneered radiation hardening by design (RHBD) technology and the company's leading-edge Virtex-5 chip architecture and design methodology.

SIRF FPGA brings RHBD technology to one of the most complex chips ever produced and opens the door for the Department of Defense (DOD) to take advantage of the latest and most cost-effective commercial electronics technology in its satellites and spacecraft. The chip is expected to replace at least half of the custom chips in use by military and other space applications, saving the DOD hundreds of millions of dollars. Xilinx sells and supports the SIRF as an off-the-shelf product. In light of its success with Xilinx, AFRL is now pursuing relationships with other commercial FPGA suppliers to ensure that the DOD will have the ongoing advantages of the latest commercial technology.