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.

Surface Plasmon Resonance Spectrometer

Use of my laser noise canceller to achieve shot-noise limited performance in SPR spectroscopy (in cooperation with Xi Wang and Andre Knoesen of UC Davis, and a bunch of my friends at IBM Almaden Research Center).

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.

High resolution touchscreens

This was for a midsize start-up making very large, high resolution touchscreen displays—they needed an outside pair of eyes to do some sanity checking of a couple of their proposed designs.