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Since Tech Briefs magazine launched the Create the Future Design contest in 2002 to recognize and reward engineering innovation, over 15,000 design ideas have been submitted by engineers, students, and entrepreneurs across six continents. You can also join the innovators who dared to dream big and build a better tomorrow by entering this year’s contest.

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Over the past 20 years, many innovators have used the recognition afforded by the contest to advance the development and marketing of their technologies. We highlight some success stories of past winners who have brought their inventions to the marketplace.

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A ‘Create the Future’ Winner Featured on ‘Here’s an Idea’

Spinal cord injury affects 17,000 Americans and 700,000 people worldwide each year. A research team at NeuroPair, Inc. won the Grand Prize in the 2023 Create the Future Design Contest for a revolutionary approach to spinal cord repair. In this Here’s an Idea podcast episode, Dr. Johannes Dapprich, NeuroPair’s CEO and founder, discusses their groundbreaking approach that addresses a critical need in the medical field, offering a fast and minimally invasive solution to a long-standing problem.

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“At COMSOL, we are very excited to recognize innovators and their important work this year. We are grateful for the opportunity to support the Create the Future Design Contest, which is an excellent platform for designers to showcase their ideas and products in front of a worldwide audience. Best of luck to all participants!”

— Bernt Nilsson, Senior Vice President of Marketing, COMSOL, Inc.

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— Kevin Hess, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Mouser Electronics

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Fault Tolerant High Speed Ethernet Train Network

Votes: 2
Views: 6945
Transportation

Trenitalia did some research efforts to develop Ethernet based networks suited for the on board train harsh environment and identified the main technical challenges to deal with such a sophisticated mobile local area network:
• fault tolerant local area network
• topology constraints due to train architecture
• data cabling requirements due to very strict fire-flames rules
• data connector housing requirements for on-board in-vehicle and between-vehicles links
• data connector requirements for on-board railway operations (mechanical vibrations and wide temperature range)
• strict latency and jitter application level response time and synchronization issues

After some prototype testing, we were able to identify the train network technical requirements: a fully switched Ethernet network with standard IEEE 802.1Q (Vlan and QoS) features. We developed and tuned two building blocks to address the main technical challenge: develop a fault tolerant network. Train architecture topology constraints were specially addressed with a “no single point of failure and no single vehicle point of failure” network meshed architecture.

Two very advanced technologies were borrowed directly from the latest high availability data centers designs: the logical switch and the logical link. From the Ethernet point of view, the logical switch (aka virtual switch) is a single logical device physically made by two or more different equipments sharing their switching tables. Logical switches support “cross-stack” logical links.

Logical links are made with two or more parallel physical connections between the same two devices. Logical links are also referred as trunk or aggregated links, with the latter automatically managed by the IEEE802.3ad-2000 LACP protocol.

A full scale train network topology with a series of 13 logical switches, connected one after the other, was build using only logical links between devices. Ethernet topology requirements (only star or extended star are allowed) were addressed with fine tuning of MSTP protocol between logical links.

Trenitalia was finally able to demonstrate a working fault-tolerant full train network. Very high data rates streaming flows were used to test the network, even with the use of very specialized industry standard deterministic traffic generators as the Ixia IxChariot tools.
A highly specialized cabling scheme for vehicles was developed with the use of two identical jumpers between coaches.

Low latency and jitter requirements as well as network bandwidth management led to a fully switched train network with standard IEEE 802.1Q (Vlan and QoS) features. The goal was achieved with a specialized high performance solution: a dual-Gigabit Ethernet Fault Tolerant Train Network proposed by Trenitalia as a Gigabit Ethernet standard solution in July 2008 to IEC TC9 WG43 and WG46.

The availability of a standard and high performance fault tolerant network will become the preferred data exchange infrastructure to deploy new services. It will be able to transfer either dedicated railway data (i.e TCMS) or new passenger multimedia services.

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  • ABOUT THE ENTRANT

  • Name:
    Andrea Gatti
  • Type of entry:
    team
    Team members:
    Andrea Gatti
    Antonio Ghelardini
  • Profession:
    Engineer/Designer
  • Number of times previously entering contest:
    never
  • Andrea's favorite design and analysis tools:
    pencil, paper and Flowcharter
  • For managing CAD data Andrea's company uses:
    Webgad
  • Andrea's hobbies and activities:
    MTB, mountainering, WW2 history
  • Andrea belongs to these online communities:
    twitter, linkedin
  • Andrea is inspired by:
    This amazing world.
  • Patent status:
    none