About the NASA Postdoctoral Program

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology.

Description:

This research area is focused on developing semiconductor based devices and circuits operating in the 100 GHz to 5000 GHz frequency range. The devices will be packaged into components that will enable the next generation of NASA instruments for Astrophysics, Earth remote sensing and Planetary discovery and exploration. GaAs based planar Schottky diodes working in the millimeter and submillimeter frequency range have seen extensive use as detectors and multipliers. Novel device design concepts that might lead to higher intrinsic efficieis are strongly encouraged. Similarly, novel circuit configurations that increase functionality per chip or leapfrog current technological boundaries are also encouraged. Device fabrication processes that allow for fast turnaround prototyping with high yields and low critical dimensions can be validated at the Micro Devices Laboratory (MDL). The MDL at JPL is a world class seminconductor device fabrication facility that can allow device researches access to state-of-the-art fabrication and characterization tools.

1) I. Mehdi, et. al., "THz Multiplier Circuits," Proceedings of the IEEE-MTTS Symposium, June 2006.

2) I. Mehdi, et. al., Submillimeter-Wave Schottky Diode Receivers, Proceedings of the Joint 32nd Intl. Conf. on Infrared and Millimeter-Waves and 15th. Intl. Conf. on Terahertz Electronics, Cardiff, United Kingdom, Sept. 2007.

Field of Science: Technology Development