James Olthoff is NIST’s first chief metrologist. Credit: NIST
Practically everything you use in your everyday life works because of measurement science. Without precise measurements, your car wouldn’t run, your phone wouldn’t work, hospitals couldn’t function, and the ATM would fail.
The demonstration of a lightwave-electronic mixer at petahertz-scale frequencies is a first step toward making communication technology faster and advances research toward developing new, miniaturized lightwave electronic circuitry capable of handling optical signals directly at the nanoscale. Credit: Sampson Wilcox/Research Laboratory of Electronics
Imagine how a phone call works. Your voice is converted into electronic signals, shifted up to higher frequencies, transmitted over long distances, and then shifted back down so it can be heard clearly on the other end.
Wire bonding is a key process in semiconductor production. Extremely fine wires with diameters of 15 to 75 µm are used to create tiny electrical connections between a semiconductor chip and other components.
In-process temperature sensors
In 1988, a small company began developing and supplying electronic instruments that automatically compensate for temperature-induced errors in industrial gages that are used to make precision dimensional measurements.
The world keeps time with the ticks of atomic clocks, but a new type of clock under development—a nuclear clock—could revolutionize how we measure time and probe fundamental physics.
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
It’s not easy making green.
Electronic temperature compensation in gaging has become a valuable tool in improving the accuracy and gage repeatability and reproducibility (GR&R) of gages in harsh manufacturing environments.
The new method could someday help alert technicians to potential problems in equipment like wind turbines or satellites. Credit: MIT News, iStock
Identifying one faulty turbine in a wind farm, which can involve looking at hundreds of signals and millions of data points, is akin to finding a needle in a haystack.
We ended the previous gaging article talking about the 10:1 rule as it applies to the performance of a gage.
TAPS, the semi-automatic sounding system for rivers and lakes, measures bodies of water independently.
Up-to-date and accurate maps of the waterways are a prerequisite for safe and efficient shipping in Germany.
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