Industrial Productivity and Manufacturing
Technology
Industrial X-ray Imaging
A breed of high-speed camera technology has evolved from a NASA need
to study effects of microgravity on science and application experiments
carried into space.
For NASA, understanding changes in metal formation and crystal growth
while exposed to the space environment--with many responses exceedingly
subtle--called for high resolution, high frame rate video technology (HHVT).
Studying flame in microgravity, in another instance, as part of combustion
research experiments performed on the space shuttle and future space station,
dictates use of such tools. In addition, NASA required that HHVT equipment
not only had to record information, but process and transmit the data.
In 1990, Lewis Research Center jointly sponsored a conference with the
U.S. Air Force Wright Laboratory focused on high speed imaging. The program
was organized as a forum where researchers from industry, universities
and government could be brought together to discuss the state of knowledge
in image gathering, coding, and processing methods.
That conference, and early funding by the Lewis Research Center, helped
to spur work by Silicon Mountain Design, Inc. (SMD) of Colorado Springs,
Colorado to break the performance barriers of imaging speed, resolution
and sensitivity through innovative technology. Continued funding by Wright
Laboratory based on this early work led to major breakthroughs in high
speed imaging technology.
| Silicon Mountain Design's digital camera
can produce high quality x-ray images for industrial and medical purposes.
NASA's need to detect subtle changes in materials made in microgravity
spurred the digital camera's development. |
Later, under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract with
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SMD also designed breakthrough technology
which does for high performance imaging what the graphic equalizer does
for home stereo equipment. A graphic equalizer in high quality audio, for
example, suppresses undesirable hiss while boosting preferred audio frequencies.
Similarly, SMD's "Max-Res" real-time image enhancing camera
yields superb, high quality, images in 1/30th of a second while limiting
distortion. The result is a rapidly available, enhanced image showing significantly
greater detail compared to image processing executed on digital computers.
The company is working with leading medical equipment manufacturers
in applying Max-Res technology for radiographic and pathology-based medical
applications.
SMD's high speed digital camera work had led to a variety of industrial
imaging markets, from airborne spectros copy to non-invasive inspection
of integrated chips and other micromachined parts. Also, Polaroid Corporation
is using the technology in a new photon tunneling microscope, while Hewlett
Packard is applying the camera to x-ray inspection devices.
SMD work has led to the development of high-speed cameras incorporating
state-of-the-art charge-coupled devices (CCD) that produce frame rates
ranging from 100 to 10,000,000 frames per second. Wright Laboratory and
the Naval Research Laboratory are using the cameras for numerous military
applications.
Germany's Qtec is using SMD camera technology to provide automated semiconductor
inspection equipment. This industrial vision system, coupled with the requisite
computer and software, can allow thousands of component parts in electronic
circuitry to be examined per minute.
Silicon Mountain Design's work earned them the 1995 and 1996 Industrial/Manufacturing
SBIR Technology of the Year Award. SMD also won the grand prize for the
SBIR Technology of the Year in 1996 for a million-frame-per -second camera.
Presented by the Technology Utilization Foundation, the award was given
to SMD "for developing an innovative new technology through the Small
Business Innovation Research program, resulting in the improvement of everyday
life and the betterment of mankind."
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