BERKELEY, CA —  R&D Magazine has announced the winners of the 41st annual R&D 100 Awards, honoring the 100 most technologically significant new products of the year. Two of the 2003 awards, which have been called the "Oscars of Invention," have gone to technologies developed by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and their collaborators: the EnergyPlus Building Simulation Program and techniques for Extreme-Ultraviolet Lithography. The new awards bring to 32 the number of R&D Awards won by Berkeley Lab researchers.

The EnergyPlus Building Simulation Program

EnergyPlus is a new computer program that models expected energy use in commercial and residential buildings. Energy use in buildings accounts for a third of the nation's total energy use and two-thirds of its electricity use. Thus even small gains in efficiency translate into enormous savings. A predecessor of EnergyPlus called DOE-2 has already saved an estimated $20 billion in energy costs since 1980. Over the next decade EnergyPlus is expected to exceed those savings.

Architects, engineers, and researchers use EnergyPlus to model complex heating, cooling, and lighting systems for innovative buildings that are more energy-efficient, more comfortable, and have lower energy cost. EnergyPlus also calculates indirect environmental effects, like atmospheric pollutants, associated with a building's energy use. More than 12,000 users have downloaded the free software since it was released. In addition, over 50 licenses to collaborative developers and eight commercial licenses have been issued.

EnergyPlus development was led by Fred Buhl, Joe Huang, and Frederick Winkelmann of Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division. Collaborators include Curtis Pedersen, Richard Liesen, and Richard Strand of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Linda Lawrie of the U.S. Army's Construction Engineering Research Laboratory; Drury Crawley of the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy; Donald Shirey of the Florida Solar Energy Center; Daniel Fisher of Oklahoma State University; William Bahnfleth of Pennsylvania State University; William Beckman of the University of Wisconsin; and Michael Witte and Jason Glazer of GARD Analytics, Inc.

Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography

The photolithography techniques that have miniaturized electronics and made today's laptop computers as powerful as a roomful of 1970s-era mainframes will soon reach their natural limit. Printing smaller chip features will require extreme ultraviolet light, whose wavelength is too short to focus with ordinary lenses.

To meet this challenge, Berkeley Lab scientists joined with scientists from Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories to form a Department of Energy Virtual National Laboratory. Together they devised and tested a chip-printing "stepper" that uses coated mirrors instead of lenses to bend and focus light.

In 2001, the first full-scale prototype demonstrated the possibility of making microprocessors with 10 times as many transistors and memory chips as today's best, operating 10 times as fast and storing 40 times as much information. In 2002, Intel Corporation placed an order for the first production model stepper.

More than 200 scientists have participated in the Virtual National Laboratory. At Berkeley Lab the effort has been led by David Attwood of the Center for X-Ray Optics in the Materials Sciences Division; at Sandia National Laboratories by Richard H. Sulen; and at Lawrence Livermore by Donald W. Sweeney. The Virtual National Laboratory worked closely with representatives of an industry consortium whose members include Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, Infineon, Intel, Micron Technologies, and Motorola.

The Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California.

Additional information

• More about EnergyPlus Building Energy Simulation Software
• More about the Simulation Research Group in Berkeley Lab's Environmental Technologies Division
• More about extreme-ultraviolet lithography (EUVL)
• More about Berkeley Lab's EUVL program at the Advanced Light Source and Center for X-Ray Optics
• More about R&D Magazine, reaching more than 90,000 scientists and engineers with news of scientific and technological discoveries behind new industrial products and processes.