The Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology today announced eight new research projects, cost-shared with U.S. industry under the Advanced Technology Program, to resolve challenging issues in key technologies that could underlie economically important new capabilities in electronics, biotechnology, energy and polymer recycling.

The projects were chosen from the ATP 1996 General Competition. If carried through to completion, the eight projects will be valued at $36.9 million, with approximately $17.6 million in funding from private industry and $19.3 million in ATP funding. The awards are contingent on the signing of formal agreements between NIST and the project proposers.

Examples of the technical hurdles to be attacked include:

• taking advantage of a newly discovered class of highly selective industrial catalysts by developing technology to directly oxidize natural gas to methanol. Schemes to directly convert methane to methanol have been attempted many times, but the resulting process has always been too inefficient for practical use. Success in this project would make possible much more economical use of the nation's vast reserves of natural gas.

• developing new designs and fabrication techniques to significantly enhance the performance of a newly developed tunable color filter for digital displays. The technology is novel, and if the work is successful, it could enable a wholly new class of small, very-high-resolution, full-color displays which should find ready application in the rapidly growing markets for tiny, lightweight displays for virtual reality gear or hand-held computers.

The Advanced Technology Program provides cost-shared funding to industry for high-risk R&D projects with the potential to spark important, broad-based economic benefits for the United States. While the program does not fund product-development projects, the ATP accelerates, or in many cases enables, potentially important R&D projects that industry otherwise would not undertake, or would not devote significant resources to, because of the significant technical risks involved.

ATP general competitions are open to proposals from any area of technology. The awards are made on the basis of a rigorous peer-reviewed competition that considers the scientific and technical merit of each project and its potential benefits to the U.S. economy. Applicants must include a detailed business plan for bringing the new technology to market with their own funds once technical milestones have been achieved under ATP support.

A list of the selected projects is attached.

As a non-regulatory agency of the Commerce Department's Technology Administration, NIST promotes U.S. economic growth by working with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements and standards.

News and information on the National Institute of Standards and Technology are available on the World Wide Web at http://www.nist.gov.

Date created:March 6, 1997
Last updated: April 12, 2005