Fermilab Honors Inventors
The Laboratory honored the achievements of 23 Fermilab inventors who received patent, copyright or license agreements in 1991 at a reception held September 3 in Wilson Hall.
During the ceremony, each innovator received a framed certificate in recognition of his valuable technology contribution at Fermilab. Honored at the reception were:
Venkata Areti, Robert Atac, Joe Biel, Mark Fischler, Irwin Gaines, Robert Hance, Don Husby and Tom Nash for their work on Interprocessor Bus Switching System for Simultaneous Communication in Plural Bus Parallel Processing that resulted in the issuance of a patent. This system facilitates high speed parallel processing in several configurations and allows calculations much faster, more conveniently and much less expensively than previously possible.
David Anderson was honored for his patent on Divalent Fluoride Doped Cerium Fluoride Scintillator. According to Dave, the use of cerium fluoride shows considerable promise for improvements in medical imaging devices. Its use as the scintillator in a positron emission tomography camera will greatly enhance the ability to image the living heart and thus better predict and prevent heart disease. Its principal application will be for medical imaging and the study of metabolic processes.
Honored for his invention of the Planar Slot Coupled Microwave Hybrid was Jeff Petter. He received a patent in December 1991. This invention can be used to design a whole new class of higher-performance broadband microwave hybrids, such as Magic Tees, 180 Hybrids and Wilkinson-type power splitters.
Ralph Niemann, John Gonczy, Tom Nicol, Finley Markley ,and Bill McCaw were honored for the patent they received for their invention, Cryogenic Support Member, and for their patent application for Apparatus for Measuring Tensile and Compressive Properties of Solid Materials at Cryogenic Temperatures. The Cryogenic Support Member is a joint that serves in cryogenic load-bearing applications, and is good in tension, compression, flexure and torsion. The technique can be applied to a wide range of tube diameters and across a broad range of service temperatures. Such a support system could be used for low-heat leak cryostats for over-the-road transports, MRI cryostats, medical accelerators that utilize superconducting magnets and similar applications.
The Apparatus for Measuring Tensile and Compressive Properties of Solid Materials at Cryogenic Temperatures is a system for the study of material properties at cryogenic temperatures. Its features include: material samples in operating (cyrogenic) environment, controlled application of compressive and/or tensile loads, measurement of forces and displacements and low-heat input to cryogenic environment.
George Hockney, Paul Mackenzie and Mark Fischler were recognized for their receipt of a copyright for the creation of CANOPY software. This software is written for the ACPMAPS multi-array processor and is highly portable and available to run on Ultrix vaxes, Sun workstations, IBM PCs, and ACP farms of AT&T 32100 nodes. CANOPY is a framework which facilitates the development and coding of a certain set of algorithms. The types of problems helped by CANOPY are those which can be thought of as existing on a collection of "sites" on a grid. For these problems, the software framework provides an easy-to-use and hardware-independent way of eliminating the complexities of paralleling tasks and communicating between sites.
Also honored at the ceremony were Charles Briegel and Kevin Cahill. They were recognized for the copyright they received on FIRUS-88 software. This software is a new embodiment of FIRUS, Fermilab's fire, utility, security and power-consumption monitoring system. FIRUS-88 runs from an IBM-AT console and uses a commercial database to provide an intuitive windowing user interface that enables simultaneous alarm reporting, device monitoring, plotting, parameter pages and data logging via a variety of displays.
Mark Fischler was also honored for his copyright on the Second Generation ACP MIPS Multiprocessor User's Manual and Joe Biel, Mark Edel, Mike Isley and Mariano Miranda were honored for the copyright for the Second Generation ACP MIPS Multiprocessor Software. This software was developed to support Second Generation ACP MIPS systems hardware and is based on the MIPS very high-speed board-oriented micro processor. The software complements the improved performance and flexibility of the hardware while reducing programming complexity for the user.
Honored for his copyright on IBM 3812 Printer Utility Software was Mike Lazarski. This software is a set of programs which provides an on-line, menu-driven facility to print line-printer type documents on the IBM 3812-series laser printers and is a culmination of an effort to simplify the usage of these printers. It is designed to allow non-technical end users a simple method of producing high-quality output using these advanced function printers. In addition, it has been written to allow its inclusion into existing systems by a site's programming staff to provide a standard method of access to these printers.