Nebula Public Library

Monitoring areas closer to plastic marine litter sources that can be very well targeted, such as rivers and estuarine systems, has the potential to improve mitigation strategies. Since the area to be monitored is much smaller, mitigation strategies can be spatially focused and even clean-up activities can be more efficient (more targeted). Recent studies showed that floating plastics emitted from the coast depict a much greater chance to rapidly return to land with most litter stranding within a short distance of the river mouth.

Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs) are crucial elements in many sensor readout systems, such as time-of-flight sensors, laser ranging devices, LiDAR, ultrasonic sensors, particle detectors, etc. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no rad-hard TDC component available on the market, which could meet the targeted specification defined in this project. The goal of this project is prototyping and lab testing of a radiation-hardened single-chip picosecond TDC in a commercial 65 nm CMOS technology.

Commonly used classical cryptographic protocols, such as the RSA-protocol, rely on the hardness of computational problems. With the advent of quantum computing (QC), the hardness assumptions of these problems is nullified, since they can be solved efficiently on a QC. On the other hand, the security of Quantum key distribution (QKD) rests upon the very laws of physics and guarantees information-theoretic security, which not only enables tap-proof communication at present, but also prevents any future technology to crack encrypted messages.

The high-level objective of HIPER-OSR was to develop a new class of Optical Solar Reflectors (OSR) characterized by being smart and flexible, whereas: