Viewing posts for the category Design Support Consulting

InGaAs Photodiode Characterization Drift and 1/f Noise at 70-90 °C

Drift and 1/f Noise at 70-90 °C
Sometimes you have to find out things that aren't in the datasheet, and even the manufacturer may not know.

Thermoacoustic Refrigeration

Thermoacoustic fridges are magic: you heat one end, and the other end gets cold. (Of course you have to sink all that heat from the middle.) They can easily be made long and skinny, and so are a natural for use down drillholes. They're also made entirely of metal, and have no moving parts, so they will survive bouncing around in the back of a truck.

Transdermal glucose detectors based on optical coherence tomography

This was a photon budget for an OCT system—interesting primarily for the effect of path delay in turning FM noise in the superluminescent diode (SLD) into AM noise in the measurement.

Mixed-reality head-mounted projection displays

I chaired a series of formal design reviews for a start-up company making immersive displays with resolution better than the human eye.

All-Optical Downlink for Antisubmarine Warfare (ASW) sonobuoys

Another Della project for the Navy: I did a photon budget that showed that this could be done optically within the power and weight constraints, and would work in bright sun as well as at night. (Optical communications are much harder to intercept or to jam than radio.)