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Successful collaboration was an important part of the silicon-germanium team's effectiveness, Keys said. He remarked that he had "never seen such a diverse team work together so well."
Professor Alan Mantooth, who led a large University of Arkansas contingent involved in modeling and circuit-design tasks, agreed. He called the project "the most successful collaboration that I've been a part of."
Mantooth termed the extreme-electronics project highly useful in the education mission of the participating universities. He noted that a total of 82 students from six universities worked on the project over five years.
Richard W. Berger, a BAE Systems senior systems architect who collaborated on the project, also praised the student contributions.
"To be working both in analog and digital, miniaturizing, and developing extreme-temperature and radiation tolerance all at the same time that's not what you'd call the average student design project," Berger said.
Miniaturizing an Architecture
BAE Systems' contribution to the project included providing the basic architecture for the remote electronics unit (REU) sensor interface prototype developed by the team. That architecture came from a previous electronics generation: the now cancelled Lockheed Martin X-33 Spaceplane initially designed in the 1990s.
In the original X-33 design, Berger explained, each sensor interface used an assortment of sizeable analog parts for the front end signal receiving section. That section was supported by a digital microprocessor, memory chips and an optical bus interface all housed in a protective five-pound box.
The extreme environments team transformed the bulky X-33 design into a miniaturized sensor interface, utilizing silicon germanium. The resulting SiGe device weighs about 200 grams and requires no temperature or radiation shielding. Large numbers
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| Contact: John Toon jtoon@gatech.edu 404-894-6986 Georgia Institute of Technology Research News Source:Eurekalert |