the cereal king

Short version: I’m going to be a Draper Fellow. Doing ridiculous things with high-efficiency RF power amplifiers and trying to cram them into as small a package as possible. And maybe figure out why they’re sometimes unstable. Yaay.

More details: My trip into Draper Laboratory was awesome. For those of you unfamiliar with the lab, it’s essentially a Department of Defense laboratory (with some commercial contracts) that was spun off from MIT during the Vietnam War. Just a few notes about my visit:

1. Security at Draper is tight. Really tight. My camera phone was confiscated at the desk and if I had brought my laptop with me, it would have been confiscated as well. And if I weren’t a U.S. citizen, apparently it would have been significantly more difficult to get in, never mind actually working there.
2. I thought I was going in just to learn more about the RF power amplifier project that I was contacted about. Turns out it was a full-blown interview for a Draper Fellow position. Whoops.
3. The current design of the “Class E” amplifier that I’m going to be looking at apparently incorporates a bunch of transmission line structure tricks that have to do with shunting harmonics away from the amplifier input and output. Highly awesome.
4. Doug (my new Draper adviser) and his boss both went to MIT as undergraduates. They both took 6.301, 6.302, 6.331, and 6.334, which made for a bunch of interesting conversations. Especially when I mentioned that Kassakian was now back teaching 6.334. Good times.
5. Doug’s also the guy that designed the 3562A dynamic analyzer at HP, which I used extensively during my 6.302 final lab. Another great conversation.
6. Doug’s boss is willing to pay for me to get a security clearance. Absolutely sweet.

Anyways, being a Draper Fellow has some other nice perks, including full funding, a fairly generous stipend (or so I’m told), and an incredible technical staff (no need to call Advanced Circuits to get a board fabricated). On the flip side, I need to work there this summer, which rules out a possible internship at ADI.

It’s nice to be able to finally figure out what I’m doing next year. And I now also have an exit plan for getting out of here. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel…

Or maybe not.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 5:03 am and is filed under thesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.