Four innovative technologies garner 2012 R&D 100 Awards for MIT Lincoln Laboratory

MIT Lincoln Laboratory received four 2012 R&D 100 Awards for technologies developed for diverse applications: improving air traffic management, enabling wide-field-of-view optics, providing secure cryptographic key management, and increasing the power and brightness of industrial lasers used in welding and cutting.

The 2012 R&D 100 Award recipients from Lincoln Laboratory are

• Lincoln Open Cryptographic Key Management Architecture — a highly portable software library that enables cryptographic protection for communication devices;
• Route Availability Planning Tool — an automated decision support tool that predicts the availability of air traffic routes during thunderstorms;
• Wavelength Beam-Combining Fiber-Coupled Diode Laser — a high-intensity diode laser that combines unprecedented brightness, efficiency, and reliability;
• Wide Field-of-View Curved Focal Plane Array — a curved, charge-coupled device that corrects for inherent aberrations of the mirrors and lenses in optical systems.

R&D Magazine, an international journal for research scientists and engineers, annually presents the awards to recognize the 100 most technologically significant innovations introduced during the previous year. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the R&D 100 Awards. Recipients are chosen from hundreds of nominations by a panel of independent evaluators and the editors of R&D Magazine. Winners represent a broad range of technologies developed by industries, government laboratories, and university research facilities.

For more about these award-winning technologies, please see the full story at http://www.ll.mit.edu/news/2012-RnD100awards.html.