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President Approves FY 1998 Appropriations for NIST
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Budget
President Approves FY 1998 Appropriations for NIST
On Nov. 26, 1997, President Clinton signed into law NIST's fiscal year 1998 budget appropriation of $677.9 million. In a time of tight fiscal constraints, this is a very good budget for NIST. All of NIST four major programs were given sufficient funding to continue promoting U.S. economic growth. Highlighting the budget is $273.9 million for the agency's laboratory and measurement programs (although nothing for proposed initiatives), $3 million for the Baldrige National Quality Program (but not including funding for the proposed healthcare and education categories), $192.5 million for the Advanced Technology Program (of which an amount not to exceed $82 million will be available for FY 1998 cost-shared grants with industry) and $113.5 million for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (with language lifting for one year the current six-year limit on funding to centers). Funding for NIST's facilities upgrade effort in Gaithersburg, Md., and Boulder, Colo., is $95 million (of which $78.3 million shall be available only after submission of a plan to Congress for expenditure of the funds).
A detailed history of the FY 1998 budget process is available by faxed request to (301) 926-1630 or on NIST's World Wide Web site (http://www.nist.gov; click on "News" and then "Budget Updates").
Media Contact:
Michael Newman (301) 975-3025
ATP
Study Shows Dramatic Impacts on Printed Wiring Board Industry
One of the first joint research ventures funded by the Advanced Technology Program led to dramatic R&D efficiencies for the participants, accelerated research and produced significant technological advances for the industry, according to a new project case study.
The project on advanced manufacturing technologies for the printed wiring board industry involved seven companies and the Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratory. The consortium achieved an estimated $35.5 million in research savings in just over half of the project's tasks alone--over two and a half times the ATP investment. They also pursued more than 30 additional research tasks that would not have been attempted without ATP support, according to the case study by economist Albert N. Link.
Several significant improvements in test methods, processes and manufacturing techniques were developed during the project, according to Link, and already have resulted in millions of dollars of savings to the industry annually. Members of the ATP project now say that as a result of the work, their companies--and the U.S. PWB industry as a whole--have improved their competitive positions in the world market. In 1997, the NCMS gave the project its Collaborative Project Excellence award and NCMS President John Decaire said the project "quite literally saved" the roughly $7 billion U.S. PWB industry, with its approximately 200,000 jobs.
The Link report is one of a series of studies commissioned by the ATP as part of the program's evaluation and analysis efforts.
Details of the Link case study are found in Advanced Technology Program: Early Stage Impacts of the Printed Wiring Board Research Joint Venture, Assessed at Project End (NIST GCR 97-722). Copies of the report may be obtained from the NIST Inquiries Office, or fax: (301) 926-1630.
Media Contact:
Michael Baum (301) 975-2763
Software Quality
NIST Seeks Data on Software Failures
Developing top-quality software--no simple task--is made more vexing by the lack of unified data detailing the pitfalls other software developers and users have experienced. To fill this void, NIST is collecting and analyzing error, fault and failure data from the development, maintenance and operation of software products to build a reference database. Once fully populated, this database can be used by the information technology industry to develop better software by improving the ability to measure the quality and effectiveness of their methods, tools and products.
NIST researchers seek participants to contribute data from software projects and from systems in service to populate the error, fault and failure database, which will allow other organizations to prepare baseline analyses useful for comparing their own development standards to the industry as a whole. Software and system information will be used to derive fault profiles and statistical analyses. All will be made available over the Internet. To protect industry data, NIST can make non-disclosure arrangements with each contributing organization.
NIST researchers have developed the EFFective Manager Tool (known as EFFTool), a free Web-based software tool to aid in the collection and analysis of fault and failure data discovered during the development or maintenance of software. The tool enables a company to track the status of faults and failures and to perform various computations on the data.
For further information, contact Dolores Wallace, Bldg. 820, Rm. 517, NIST, Gaithersburg, Md. 20899-0001, (301) 975-3340, fax: (301) 926-3696, http://hissa.nist.gov/toolkit/eff.html.
Media Contact:
Anne Enright Shepherd (301) 975-4858
Manufacturing
Agencies Launch Technology Roadmap Effort
NIST and three other federal agencies have launched a one-year effort to develop "integrated manufacturing technology roadmaps" that will help to guide their research investments. The IMTR, a priority-setting refinement of the next generation manufacturing project completed earlier this year, will define long-term technology needs in four high-impact areas: information systems, modeling and simulation, processes and equipment, and enterprise integration.
In addition to NIST, sponsors of the new strategic initiative are the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Energy and National Science Foundation. Through industry surveys and other methods, the agencies aim to anticipate the tools and capabilities that will be essential to superior manufacturing performance and capabilities over the next 5 to 15 years. A questionnaire focusing on information technologies for manufacturing has been posted on the World Wide Web (http://www.epm.ornl.gov/~mox/cgi-bin/imtr.html), and it is being distributed to a cross-section of organizations and manufacturing leaders. Surveys specific to the other three technology areas are in the works.
The sponsors aim to deliver four integrated roadmaps that provide a shared perspective for investing in long-term technology development. It will identify major technology needs and challenges cutting across industrial sectors. Details of the roadmap will be the basis for crafting government/ industry R&D agendas, and they will enable companies and industries to ascertain whether these agendas respond to their key technology requirements.
A status report on the IMTR will be given at the annual National Manufacturing Technology Conference, to be held at NIST's Gaithersburg, Md., headquarters on April 21-22, 1998. For more information, contact Mark Luce, NIST, (301) 975-2159, or Richard Neal, DoE's Oak Ridge Centers for Manufacturing Technology, (423) 574-1862.
Media Contact:
Mark Bello (301) 975-3776
Electromagnetics
NIST Helps Better Characteristics LF Anechoic Chambers
Semi-anechoic and fully anechoic chambers are facilities commonly used by U.S. manufacturers for demonstrating compliance (with both domestic and international regulations, as well as requirements for interference and susceptibility) of their electronic products. The number of these low-frequency (20 megahertz to 1 gigahertz) electromagnetic test facilities has been increasing steadily during the past decade. However, a major problem in their use has been the time-consuming and difficult task of characterizing and verifying their performance.
To solve the problem, NIST has developed new procedures for characterizing low-frequency anechoic chambers. The NIST method centers on a new chamber figure-of-merit based on the decay time of the chamber. This decay time in turn is based on the average reflection coefficient of the energy incident on the chamber walls. Implementation of the new technique avoids labor-intensive measurements and eliminates complex, intensive, time-consuming and, therefore, costly numerical analysis by making use of simplifying approximations that can be shown not to affect the utility of the result. It also enables assessment of chamber performance by means of a single parameter, a significant improvement over existing methods (which have a strong dependence on setup and instrumentation).
Another procedure, for relating chamber figure-of-merit to chamber capability for supporting specific tests, is under development.
Papers (nos. 42-97-A and 42-97-B) describing the work are available from Sarabeth Harris, MC 104, NIST, Boulder, Colo. 80303-3328, (303) 497-3237.
Media Contact:
Collier Smith (Boulder) (303) 497-3198
Health
Consortium Seeks Better Measures for Emerging Industry
A new NIST Consortium on Brachytherapy Manufacturing Technology aims to root a budding healthcare industry in a solid measurement base. Now enlisting members, the consortium will focus on the complex technical needs of manufacturers of tiny radioactive "seeds" used to treat cancer patients and, more recently, to prevent recurring blood-vessel blockages in people who undergo angioplasty or other artery-clearing procedures.
In the still-experimental heart therapy, a catheter is inserted into treated arteries, which are briefly exposed to the radioactive seeds. Confined to a range of only a few millimeters, doses of ionizing radiation have been shown in clinical trials to inhibit the formation of scar tissue that can eventually obstruct blood flow, a problem for 30 percent to 40 percent of angioplasty patients. NIST and its partners will devise and evaluate automated tools to support designing, producing and calibrating the radioactive seeds.
NIST-developed modeling and simulation software for calculating the distribution and absorption of radiation doses will be extended and incorporated into "expert" computer systems that manufacturers can use to evaluate designs of new radiation sources.
The consortium also will create standard reference materials for ensuring the accuracy of measurements made during production. In addition, plans calls for building an automated calibration system for pre-shipment inspections of final products. Work will be based at NIST's National Advanced Manufacturing Testbed. The NAMT is a state-of-the-art computing and communications testbed where industry, university and government collaborators are developing the infrastructural technologies necessary for U.S. manufacturers to fully realize the performance advantages enabled by modern information technology.
For more information, contact Christopher Soares, C229 Radiation Physics Bldg., NIST, Gaithersburg, Md. 20899-0001, (301) 975-5589. Also, check out the project page on the World Wide Web at http://www.mel.nist.gov/namt/projects/physics/rad1.htm.
Media Contact:
Mark Bello (301) 975-3776
U.S.
Department of Commerce
Technology Administration
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Editor: Michael Newman
HTML conversion: Crissy Wines
Last Updated: February 18, 1998
