Interview with Dr. Rainee N. Simons

Featured Engineer

Dr. Rainee N. Simons

Dr. Rainee N. Simons - Chief, Electron & Opto-Electronic Devices Branch, NASA Glenn Research Center

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

As a child, I used to try and repair battery-operated toys. Most of the time these required minor repairs such as restoring a broken solder connection or replacing a light bulb. As I grew older, I shifted my interest to home appliances, which were more complex with motors etc. In my freshman and sophomore years in college I volunteered to serve as the Secretary of the Electronics Club. All of the above ushered me into the wonderful world of Electrical Engineering as a career.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

Currently, I am investigating the performance of high data rate microwave transceivers for space communications and my favorite hardware tools are the high frequency vector network analyzer and spectrum analyzer.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I enjoy reporting my research work in peer-reviewed journals and international conference proceedings. For this task, my favorite software tools are word processing and graphics packages. In addition, to accurately predict the performance of my RF circuits, I prefer a full-wave electromagnetic simulation software package.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

In my area of high frequency circuits, it is always a pleasure to see good agreement between numerically modeled and measured data over a broad frequency band. However, on few occasions there has been disagreement between modeled and measured results. After some careful introspection it was evident that either the assumptions in the theoretical model or fabrication/measurement errors have been the major cause for the discrepancy.

What is on your bookshelf?

On my bookshelf I have lots of books covering topics from basic to advanced communications technology. To name a few: T. Pratt, C.W. Bostian and J.E. Allnutt “Satellite Communications”, S.C. Cripps “RF Power Amplifiers for Wireless Communications”, E. McCune “Practical Digital Wireless Signals”, B. Sklar “Digital Communications Fundamentals and Applications” and T.H. Lee “Planar Microwave Engineering”.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve? (Special way to analyze circuits, special process you use to make something, etc.)

Start with an end goal in mind and then formulate a good work plan that takes into consideration potential risks/uncertainty and stick to it.

What has been your favorite project?

Millimeter wave semiconductor devices such as transistors typically have output power in the range of few watts. However, for reliable communications over large planetary distances, transmitters with output power in the range of several tens of watts are required. My favorite project has been to develop miniature high efficiency microwave power combiners, which can combine the output from several low power devices to achieve the desired high transmit power.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences? (Blowing up things, getting shocked, etc.)

Safety has always been an integral part of my work environment and culture and hence I cannot recall any such experience.

What are you currently working on?

Modern sensor technologies on board Earth observing spacecrafts are capable of gathering several hundred gigabits of science data per orbit. With several orbits per day, the data volume can easily reach several terabits per day. My current work is to design spectrally efficient on-orbit reconfigurable microwave communications systems that can downlink this data at very high speeds to the user scientific community.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

In the next decade, by enhancing the spectral or bandwidth efficiency, reconfiguring the system performance on-orbit using software techniques and operating at frequencies several times higher than the current state of practice, space communications data requirements can be achieved.