Senior RF Engineer
Our team activities include development of custom RF components and wideband and high dynamic range RF systems—systems that support phased arrays, high resolution time stamping, and a wide variety of demodulators, detectors, advanced waveform analyzers, and classifiers for use in intercept and geo-location of signals of interest. As a member of our team, you will have broad responsibility covering RF and EM interactions and performance of our products. The work would include understanding the needs of various customers and working through architectural decisions with the rest of the team, leading to the design, construction, characterization, and interoperability testing of custom wideband SDR’s, antennas, and antenna arrays used in our products. You will work with FPGA and SDR software design engineers to architect and implement efficient and robust algorithms for built-in test, calibration, and real-time control of the RF hardware.
We are looking for an individual that generates creative, technically sound solutions and can rapidly prototype them to support proof-of-concept experiments. Projects include: design, implementation, and testing of active antenna elements with integrated LNA; design, implementation, and testing of wideband and potentially physically distributed receiver chains (LNA, mixers, filters, switch banks, ADC interface) that interface to an array of antennas.
Duties
- Developing miniature, wideband, potentially physically distributed, architectures to interface with multi-band vector sensor antenna arrays
- Full Wave EM simulation of: antennas; vehicles; antennas on vehicles, interaction between antennas, and RF circuit layouts (filters, LNA, mixers, switches, etc.); (e.g. with tools such as HFSS, CST, SENTRi, FEKO, NEC, etc.)
- Assembling appropriate test jigs and characterizing components (HBT, pHEMT, etc.) to enable design and simulation prior to fabrication (e.g. measuring noise-parameters, S or X parameters, Spice model parameters);
- Optimizing the noise, match, dynamic range, and bandwidth of an LNA design and a system design.
- Linear simulation of RF circuits (e.g. with RF circuit design tools such as ADS, AWR, Ansys, Genesys)
- Design (schematic capture, PCB layout, linear and full-wave EM simulation), implementation, bring-up and testing of components and full systems.
- Calibration of products (e.g. antenna chamber or open area test site)
- Field testing products with customers
Qualifications
- MS/PhD in Electrical Engineering and demonstrable portfolio of functional RF designs and accomplishments
- Minimum 5 years RF design experience
- Skilled at least one RF circuit design/simulation/layout tool such as ADS, AWR, Ansys, Genesys
- Skilled with at least one full-wave EM simulation tool such as HFSS, CST, CREATE-RF (SENTRi, Capstone), FEKO, NEC
- Experience using and calibrating RF test equipment like a VNA, TDR, Spectrum Analyzer, Noise Figure Measurement, Oscilloscope.
- Personal communication skills
- Strong desire to work with, understand, and solve problems in the RF domain
Relevant Extras
- Skilled with design and fab of thin-film and thick-film modules
- Skilled with a standard PCB design tool such as Altium, OrCad/Allegro
- TS/SCI clearance desired. U.S. Citizenship required
