Three technologies developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory are among the recipients of the 2026 R&D 100 Awards, which each year recognize the 100 most significant innovations that have moved into practical use or been made available for licensing over the past year. The program has been run annually since 1963 and is managed by R&D World, an online publication; the worldwide competition is judged by an independent panel of science and technology experts together with industry professionals.
The laboratory's winning projects address obstacles to making systems more secure and more capable. One is an operating system built to shield embedded computers from cyberattacks. Another is a platform that integrates superconductor and semiconductor chips into a wafer-scale system intended for quantum or high-performance computing. The third is an algorithm that removes the interference 5G base stations create for radio frequency devices operating on the same channel.
"These awarded technologies address critical problems in cybersecurity, quantum computing, and communications. We're proud of our dedicated staff who developed and transitioned these technologies for the nation's advantage," said Melissa Choi, director of Lincoln Laboratory.
Since 2010, Lincoln Laboratory has accumulated 111 R&D 100 Awards honoring the transfer of its unclassified technologies to industry and government, and many additional technology transitions occur each year on classified projects. That transfer is central to the laboratory's role as a federally funded research and development center for the Department of War (DoW).
Secure-by-design operating system
Embedded computers inside deployed systems such as satellites, drones, and radars keep missions intact and people safe, but the operating systems running them are prime targets for cyberattacks. These systems are large, complex, and built on decades of legacy designs that predate modern cyber threats, and artificial intelligence is increasingly helping adversaries exploit their vulnerabilities.
To protect embedded systems, Lincoln Laboratory created Magnetite, an operating system designed to be inherently more secure. "If Windows and Linux are the familiar workhorses of general-purpose computing, Magnetite is built for the different realities of embedded systems, for which real-time performance matters, resources are tight, and system failure has physical consequences," said Juliana Furgala, principal investigator in the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group.
Several components underpin Magnetite's security. It sits on top of seL4, a formally verified microkernel, meaning mathematical proofs have guaranteed that the microkernel's code behaves exactly as intended, which removes a source of security flaws. Above that foundation, Magnetite's OS services, including networking, storage, and communication, are written in Rust, a programming language that prevents common memory-corruption bugs that hackers frequently exploit. Finally, the services are configured as isolated processes under the principle of least privilege, so different parts of an embedded system cannot reach data they do not need; if one service is compromised, it can be locked down while the system's critical functions keep running.
Magnetite is free for government use and approved partners and is now being integrated into space and flight platforms for the DoW. The team sees potential to extend it to other embedded domains, such as control systems for critical infrastructure, and because it provides a common, reusable foundation for building specialized mission capabilities, the team is working with other technical groups across the laboratory to offer Magnetite as an alternative to the costly proprietary operating systems currently in use. In addition to the R&D 100 Award, Magnetite was selected as MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Best Invention of 2025.
Wafer-scale platform for quantum systems
Modern computing systems are increasingly constrained not by transistor performance but by interconnection bottlenecks: the electrical pathways linking densely packed chips consume space, slow data transfer, and generate heat. The problem is especially acute in quantum systems, which depend on bulky coaxial cables to connect superconducting chips, which must be cryogenically cooled to reach zero electrical resistance, with room-temperature control electronics.
The Quantum Microsystems platform tackles this interconnection challenge by integrating hundreds of superconductor and semiconductor chips into a single wafer-scale system through several combined innovations. First, an AI decision-tree approach determines the optimal way to route connections between chips across a wafer. After the wafer is tested for defects, a digital lithography process draws custom wiring layers between chip locations and around defective circuit components to obtain the highest possible yield from the wafer. Chips are then linked using microbump techniques, tiny bumps of conductive material that join stacked chips, or bumpless techniques that place them extremely close together, while a superconducting fabric extends these connections across the wafer to form a unified computing platform that carries signals at near light speed. Integrated, lithographically defined flexible interconnects replace coaxial cables, substantially reducing cryogenic wiring overhead and system complexity.
The platform is designed to be reworkable, so chiplets can be replaced or upgraded without rebuilding the entire system, and it supports designs ranging from individual and stitched-reticle architectures to mix-and-match multireticle configurations and fully integrated wafer-scale platforms. Its AI engine continuously adapts to process variations and design changes to enable efficient, data-driven microsystem manufacturing.
"By shifting from chip-level scaling to AI-optimized system-level integration, the platform establishes a new paradigm for building ultra-efficient, large-scale computing infrastructure for applications in quantum computing, AI, and high-performance computing," said Rabindra Das, principal investigator in the Quantum-Enabled Computation Group. The technology is designed for transition to government and commercial foundries and may be available for licensing and collaborative development through Lincoln Laboratory's technology transfer process.
Algorithm to cancel 5G interference
As 5G cellular networks have expanded, they have introduced an unintended source of interference: in certain environments, powerful signals from 5G base stations can spill into frequency bands used by nearby non-5G RF antennas, burying the signals of systems such as military radars, aircraft altimeters, satellite ground stations, and radio telescopes.
Lincoln Laboratory researchers developed an algorithm that isolates and removes the 5G signal from an affected antenna's signal. Because 5G networks follow a published international standard, the canceler can decode the structure of a nearby base station's transmission and estimate the distortion caused by multipath scattering in the environment well enough to reconstruct a copy of the interfering signal. That reconstructed copy is then subtracted from the incoming data, leaving a clean signal.
Unlike traditional interference cancellation approaches such as beamforming, the technique does not require spatial separation between the interfering and desired signals. And because it removes interference on each individual antenna channel of the receiver, it preserves antenna resources that may be needed to counter other kinds of interference, such as jamming.
The team validated the algorithm using signals captured over the air from a Nokia 5G base station at Hill Air Force Base. The tests recovered a test radar signal buried under cellular interference, restoring it to within two decibels of its original signal-to-noise ratio, which corresponds to 89 percent preservation of the radar's interference-free detection range.
"While 5G waveforms exhibit complex structure, their generation is governed by global standards that allow our cancellation methodology to generalize across base station radio heads made by a diverse set of vendors," said Binoy Kurien, principal investigator in the Tactical Edge Communications Group.
The DoW is now evaluating the technology for use on multiple platforms. Because the core structure of the 5G waveform is expected to carry over into future cellular generations, the approach may also extend to interference from 6G networks as they emerge.