Just in the Los Angeles area alone, USGS database shows a 95.23% change of a major earthquake occurring. While there are a variety of seismic devices already installed for the protection of high value structures, other customizable, cost efficient devices currently don’t exist for a wide range of other structures such as apartments, residential homes, or event moderate to high value equipment and artifacts. University of California has invented a novel material and method for creating cost efficient seismic protection devices for all types of such structures.

The ability to accurately quantify gas volumes in liquid flows has important applications in environmental science and industry. For example, environmental processes that significantly contribute to changes in earth’s climate, such as methane seeps from the sea floor and the exchange of gases between the ocean and atmosphere at the sea surface, demand precise sensors that are small and sensitive enough to measure the ratio of liquids and gases in these bubbly mixtures. These measurements also play a critical role in the operational efficiency of a wide variety of different engineering processes. Applications include, the monitoring the optimal amount of bubbled oxygen in the treatment of waste water and sewage, and the oil and gas industry, especially in undersea oil pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico alone, have spent billions of dollars annually on added refinement techniques to remove seawater that could be preventable if sensors were able to measure the ratio of crude oil, seawater and gas as the mixture is pumped through pipelines. These challenges exist in both research and industry because the current manufacturing process for making the needed gas/liquid probes have significant cost constraints. Clearly, there is a need for a new and cost-effective technology to produce these probes.

Normally, charging a capacitive load from a voltage source invokes a ½ CV2 energy penalty. The concept of adiabatic charging, where the capacitor is charged more slowly than nominally afforded by the natural RC time constant of the charging circuit in the pursuit of reducing energy dissipation to below ½ CV2, has been around for decades. However, there has not been any solution to enabling this slow charging phenomenon in a practical, low-overhead embodiment. For example, prior work used separate DC-DC converters to provide multiple voltage levels, or used resonant inductors, both of which invoke significant area overhead.

Medical devices and wearable consumer products have fundamental anatomically-driven size constraints that necessitate small form factors. Since most patients and consumers desire long battery life, and battery volume is limited by anatomy, one of the only ways to increase lifetime is to reduce the power of the underlying circuits. The power consumption of wireless communication circuits is often large, and while power can be minimized by restricting the communication distance to just a few meters from sensor nodes to a personal base station as part of a body-area network (BAN), it can still dominate the overall energy budget of a wearable device. Current human body communication (HBC) systems communicate using capacitive electrodes that are placed on the body and generate electric fields that then have fringing currents that travel through conductive biological tissues (in one embodiment – galvanic coupling) or fringing fields that interact with the surrounding environment (in another embodiment – capacitive coupling). Both techniques have slightly better path loss than conventional far-field RF techniques, but suffer from electrode impedance variation, environmental variation, or both, making the design of ultra-low power HBC systems difficult. Establishing methods that improve path gain and thus reduced power consumption will aid the functionality of industry devices greatly. 

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering have developed a novel wireless sensor for external and internal biosensing applications.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering have developed a novel wireless sensor and exercise system for real-time exercise promotion and monitoring.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have created a device that delivers pressure or displacement to specific locations based on the frequency of the actuator used as input.

High density micro-reactors are fabricated to form an array of wells into a surface for use in high throughput microfluidic applications in biology and chemistry. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine developed a method for increasing micro-reactor densities per unit area using rapidly self-assembled three-dimensional crystalline formation droplet arrays, and a device for performing the same.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a standing wave architecture for scalable and wideband millimeter wave and terahertz radiator and phased arrays.

Inventors at UC Irvine developed a portable spirometry system that automatically uploads patient pulmonary data to the Internet, and provides a cloud-based platform to analyze and share the data with an attending healthcare professional.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering have developed a novel lensfree incoherent holographic microscope using a plasmonic aperture.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering have developed a novel lensfree super-resolution holographic microscope using wetting films on a chip.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering have developed a novel field portable fluorescence microscope that can be used as a smart phone accessory.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering have invented a novel device that can quantify chlorophyll concentration in plants using a custom-designed Google Glass app.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering have invented a novel method to concentrate nanoparticles (NPs) into metal crystals via zone melting.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry & Physics and Astronomy have developed a novel method to lithograph two polished solid surfaces by using a simple mechanical alignment jig with piezoelectric control and a method of pressing them together and solidifying a material.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering have invented a novel biocompatible flexible device fabrication method using fan-out wafer level processing (FOWLP).

The present invention relates to portable Spirometry system that uses sound to transmit pulmonary airflow information to a receiver.

The present invention describes a component package that enables a microfluidic device to be fixed to a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) or other substrate, and embedded within a larger microfluidic system.

The present invention discloses a nonlinear optical microscopy (NLOM) instrument for rapid imaging of wide areas and large volumes of biological tissues or other materials, ex vivo or in vivo, at sub-micron resolution. The instrument allows much larger field of view (FOV) at the same time improves the scan speed.

100 Tiny Hands is an experiential learning program that imparts science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM”) education to children ages six to twelve using storybook-inspired curriculum coupled with interactive educational “toolboxes.”

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering have developed a novel tunable and efficient terahertz (THz) plasmon generation on-chip via graphene monolayers.

Researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UCLA have developed a novel transducer for audio applications based on a multiferroic material.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a novel design for a solar power converter. The system uses an efficient selective absorber to harvest solar radiation.

Modern mobile applications strive for the complete integration of all communication systems in CMOS. Unfortunately, it is conventionally difficult to efficiently generate high levels of RF power in scaled CMOS largely due to the inherently low voltage ratings of core transistors. To realize high output power with ~1V transistors, power combining techniques have been proposed whereby the output of several low-voltage power amplifier (PA) cells are combined via inductive transformers. However, power combining relies on ultra-thick metal that still carries large ohmic and substrate losses. These AC-AC losses, combined with the DC-AC losses of the PAs themselves, and the DC-DC losses of the battery-connected power converters, result in limited total transmitter efficiencies. Even modern digital PA techniques such as RF-DACs, digital Doherty, and digital out-phasing, which have been proposed to leverage the excellent switch performance of scaled transistors and offer reconfigurable operation, still require battery-connected DC-DC converters and RF transformers/power combiners, both of which result in cascaded losses.