Viewing posts from May, 2013

The mountain hath been in labour....TAOS v Intersil is going again

After almost exactly three years waiting for a claim construction ruling, this case has gotten started again. I'm working on the trade secret side of a complicated suit arising out of a contemplated acquisition that wasn't completed.

SWIR Spectrometer for Biomedical Measurements

I just shipped a proof-of-concept prototype for a fibre-coupled, grating-based transcutaneous short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectrometer. This was a fun one, and demonstrated once again the vital importance of a good photon budget to a successful instrument design. The right tradeoff of complexity, resolution, and stability was not at all obvious at the beginning. The photon budget made clear that with the right grating, the right number of illumination and detection fibres, and the right detector, we'd have an economical design with lots of light for the measurement. One key result of the photon budget was that we could use an uncooled extended (2.6 μm cutoff) InGaAs detector, but that it had to be stabilized near room temperature.