Critical & Emerging Technologies

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are growing at frentic pace driven by civil, consumer and military requirements. In order for a UAS to safely navigate in the already crowded aerial environment of the modern world, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other international organizations have mandated that unmanned aircraft must …

US, Russia and China are in race for Hypersonic Weapons that shall provide prompt global strike capability.  Russia’s Avangard hypersonic missile system became operational in Dec 2019, defence minister Sergey Shoygu has said. The intercontinental weapon can fly 27 times the speed of sound and, unlike a regular missile warhead, …

Free Space Optical or Laser communications is creating a new communications revolution, that by using visible and infrared light instead of radio waves for data transmission  is providing  large bandwidth, high data rate, license free spectrum, easy and quick deployability,  low mass and  less power requirement. It also offers low …

The Air-to-Air Missile (AAM) is a potent guided missile that changed the shape of aerial combat forever. Capable of destroying fast and maneuverable jet fighters at ranges sometimes exceeding 100 kilometers, these high-tech weapons dominate the skies. The  probability of Aerial dogfights are becoming less in modern times, as US …

The Department of the Interior published on May 18, 2018, a list of 35 mineral commodities considered critical to the economic and national security of the United States. These minerals have been designated as critical to the US’s national interest in part because of their potential military and industrial applications. …

In 1965 R&D Director at Fairchild (and later Intel co-founder) Gordon Moore predicted continued systemic declines in cost and increase in performance of integrated circuits in his paper “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.”Moore’s Law which stated that the number of transistors on a chip will double approximately every two …

In recent weeks, concern over the emergence of a novel coronavirus in China has grown exponentially as media, experts and government officials around the world have openly worried that this new disease has the potential to develop into a global pandemic. As the ongoing coronavirus outbreak centered in China has spread …

Quantum cryptography is an emerging technology in which two parties may simultaneously generate shared, secret cryptographic key material using the transmission of quantum states of light. A unique aspect of quantum cryptography is that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle ensures that if Eve attempts to intercept and measure Alice’s quantum transmissions, her …

The helicopter is a type of aircraft which is lifted and propelled by one or more sets of horizontally revolving overhead rotors.  It has two rotors that spin several blades. A blade is a tilted airfoil, just like an airplane wing. As it speeds through the air, each blade generates …