IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019 - 6

2019 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

Millions of people lack access to medicine across the globe. Every
day, thousands of people die because they become ill or injured far
from the life-saving blood or medicines that could save their lives.
Another problem is last-minute delivery; the further you travel
outside of the city, whether you are in a developed or developing
country, the harder it is to access the medicine that you need to
stay healthy and alive.
For example, one of the most common causes of maternal mortality is excessive blood loss while giving birth, known as postpartum hemorrhage (PPH). In 2015, more than 82,000 women died
because of PPH, many of them in remote villages in developing
countries. And yet, the vast majority of these deaths could have
been prevented if only donor blood were readily available.
Another complication occurs when either hospitals don't have
what they need (stock outs) or don't need what they have (waste).
Zipline has been able to help hospitals reduce the amount of
blood they keep in stock while increasing access to rare blood
products by 175% and reducing waste to zero.
Zipline International, founded in 2014, has created electric
aerial drones and supporting technologies to deliver lifesaving
substances to villages on a large scale. The company began operations in Rwanda in October 2016, where it now has two distribution centers that have so far made more than 10,000 medical deliveries by drone.This year, the company is expanding into Ghana,
where it plans to build four distribution centers. After they are all
operational, Zipline's half-dozen distribution centers in Rwanda
and Ghana will be capable collectively of delivering up to one
ton of supplies per day. Each of Zipline's custom-designed, fixedwing drones can carry 1.8 kilograms-or three pints-of blood,
and each distribution center can service multiple villages up to 80
kilometers away. Flying at 100 km/h, the drones take on average
30 minutes to get their payloads to their destination, day or night,
rain or shine.

For decades, integrated circuits have been following Moore's famous "law" of periodically doubling transistor counts. Although it
is not as well known, a similar law (sometimes called Keck's Law)
has been describing the bit-rate improvement of fiber optic cables.
From speeds of around 90 megabits per second in 1980, technological breakthroughs over the years enabled researchers to channel data at higher and higher rates. Advances such as single-mode
fibers, fiber amplifiers, advanced error correction, and wavelengthdivision multiplexing enabled engineers to increase data rates exponentially.
By 1996, the first transatlantic cable to use fiber amplifiers,
known as TAT 12/13, was able to carry 5 gigabits per second on
each of a pair of optical fibers on a single wavelength. In 2001, at
the height of the dot-com boom, data rates started approaching a
terabit per second on a single fiber, thanks to a technology called
Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. It channeled 10 gigabits
per second on each of as many as 100 diﬀerent wavelengths.
Today, the need for extremely high bandwidth is being driven by
huge datacenters, such as the ones operated by Google, Facebook,
Amazon, and Microsoft. To meet this need, companies developed
coherent communications technology and are now delivering systems capable of handling hundreds of gigabits per second on a
single wavelength. Among this group, Ciena Corp.'s Wavelogic 5
Extreme system is particularly noteworthy, with demonstrated bit
rates of 800 gigabits per second on a single wavelength. Achieving
such high rates required breakthroughs in many diﬀerent specialties, including digital signal processing (implemented in 7-nanometer CMOS) and very high-bandwidth electro-optics.

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IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019