IEEE Awards Booklet - 2018 - 6

2018 ieee sPectrum's corPorate awards

IEEE Spectrum Technology in the
Service of Society Award

IEEE Spectrum Emerging Technology Award
Sponsored by IEEE Spectrum

Sponsored by IEEE Spectrum

Project Loon,
X, the moonshot factory

ASML Holding N.V.

Imagine wireless base stations floating in the stratosphere, providing broadband-speed Internet connections to the people below, no
matter how remote their location. That's the idea behind Project
Loon, a venture at X, a sibling company of Google. Project Loon
uses high-altitude balloons and solar power to quickly establish
wireless networks with data rates as great as those of 4G LTE.
From a trial involving 30 balloons over the south island of New
Zealand in 2013, the project has gone on to successful trials in
Peru, Brazil, and most recently, Puerto Rico, where Loon balloons
provided wireless service in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria
to 200,000 residents of the island. In order to provide wireless
service to a specific region, Project Loon engineers had to solve
immense challenges, including inventing techniques to keep a
cluster of stratospheric balloons over an area and for an extended
period. They developed extremely sophisticated machine-learning algorithms that enable the balloons to navigate to an area
and then maintain position and altitude in the powerful wind
currents in the stratosphere. The system accomplishes this in part
by relying on dynamic maps of the stratospheric winds that are
updated constantly. Other software manages the unique challenges of maintaining connectivity in a cellular wireless network in
which not only the customers are moving around, but also the
base stations.
X is now negotiating partnerships with local communications
providers to use Loon to establish Internet service to some of the
world's most underserved regions. They're also looking forward
to working closely with industry and governments to help them
better prepare for disasters.

Gordon Moore, who won the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2008,
famously declared in 1965 that the number of transistors on an
integrated circuit was doubling at regular intervals, and that it
would continue to do so for the foreseeable future.The prophecy
has held up beyond anyone's expectations (including Moore's). So
now, 53 years later, the "Law," as it is known, still defines the pace
of progress in the $409-billion-a-year semiconductor industry.
But to keep the pace, remarkable breakthroughs must be achieved
regularly. Some of the greatest of these occur in the area of photolithography, in which radiation is used to project patterns onto
photosensitive materials in successive steps to create the transistors
of an integrated circuit (IC). Starting out with visible light in the
1960s, lithographers had to invent new processes based on shorter
and shorter wavelengths to produce smaller and smaller features.
To continue the relentless pace, they had no choice but to move
into the realm of X-rays, or Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV).
The challenges were great. There was no powerful and reliable
source of the EUV radiation.The exposure process would have to
be carried out in a total vacuum, because air absorbs EUV radiation. Also, lenses are useless at these wavelengths, so researchers
had to build special multilayer mirrors. Over a period of decades,
ASML managed to solve these and countless other challenges and
develop a complete, working EUV lithography system. This pioneering system is set to begin producing commercial ICs later
this year at several of the world's most advanced chip-fab facilities.

6 | 2018 IEEE awards bookLET

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