Sandia has accumulated 80 R&D 100 Awards since 1976. See a description of past awards at our corporate website…
2009 Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary
“Once again, DOE’s labs are at the cutting edge of innovation with new technology developments to enhance America’s economic and national security. My heartiest congratulations to the DOE researchers and scientists who have won R&D Magazine’s prestigious awards this year.”
Sandia/California VP
“The R&D 100 Awards are an important metric of Sandia’s success in impacting the nation through our discovery and innovation. They also serve a key role in demonstrating to industry that Sandia is an eager partner in technology maturation.”
The prestigious R&D 100 Awards are given each year by R&D Magazine to the 100 most technologically significant new products from around the world. The sole criterion for winning, according to a description released by the magazine, is “demonstrable technological significance compared with competing products and technologies.” Properties noted by judges include smaller size, faster speed, greater efficiency, and higher environmental consciousness.
The judging of the R&D 100 Awards first began in 1963. These awards — sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prizes of applied research” or the “Oscars of invention” — now represent the pinnacle of recognition for scientific innovators. Sandia and our partners have been honored with more than 80 R&D 100 Awards since 1976. Sandia received five awards in 2009 and played a role in a sixth:
To learn more about R&D 100 awards that Sandia has received in past years, visit our corporate website.
The system rapidly finds all emitting fluorescence species of an image, determining their relative concentrations without any a priori information. This patent-pending technology has been combined with Sandia’s proprietary algorithms to form a complete system for the extraction of quantitative image information at diffraction-limited spatial resolutions of 250 nanometers (nm) in the x and y planes and 600 nm in the z plane. The speed with which this information is acquired exceeds the acquisition of other available hyperspectral imaging microscopes. Learn more.
The module more efficiently converts electrical energy from one form to another. This invention reduces the size and volume of power electronic systems by an order of magnitude over present state-of-the-art silicon-based solutions while simultaneously reducing energy loss by greater than 50 percent, offering the potential for users to save hundreds of millions of dollars. Applications are in hybrid and electric vehicles, renewable energy interfaces, and aircraft.
This platform enables wavelength-division multiplexed communications within high-performance computers. The ultrasmall components establish a platform of elements capable of addressing the bandwidth and power consumption problems of high-performance computer and data communications networks. Silicon-resonant modulators demonstrate for the first time 100 microwatts/gigabit/second optical data transmission on a silicon CMOS-compatible platform. Together with the first high-speed silicon bandpass switches, the platform enables optical data transmission and routing on a silicon platform at nanosecond switching speeds with up to 100 times less power consumption and 100 times the bandwidth density compared to traditional electronic approaches.
The kernel leverages hardware capabilities of multicore processors to deliver significant improvements in data access performance for today’s parallel computing applications. CNW provides enhanced data access capabilities beyond other equivalent operating systems by employing a new technique that targets memory bandwidth, arguably the most important area of performance in scientific parallel computing. The CNW software is licensed to Cray, Inc., and is the operating system for the Sandia/Cray Red Storm supercomputer at Sandia.
This innovative nanotechnology for producing metal nanostructures offers unique control over their shape, size, porosity, composition, stability, and other functional properties compared with those achieved by existing methods. Novel catalysts and electrocatalysts produced by the Sandia approach are expected to significantly reduce platinum metal usage and thus the cost of platinum catalysts in fuel cells, solar cells, and other applications in the renewable-energy sector.
Sandia shares a part of this award for moving research forward to enable the blind to see. The project employs a small video camera on a patient’s glasses, sending images to a compact image processor on the patient’s belt. The processor commands an implant to deliver the desired pulse of current to an electrode array attached to the patient’s retinal tissue. This inner-eye array stimulates the retinal tissue nerves, which ultimately connect to nerves leading to the visual cortex of the brain where the patient sees an image. The award was given to a multilab/industry collaboration funded by DOE, initiated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and submitted for an award by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sandia is developing microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and high-voltage subsystems for advanced artificial-retina implant designs. These include microtools, electronics packaging, and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).