Prof. Todd R. Weatherford received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Rutgers University in 1983, and an MS in Electrical Engineering and PhD from North Carolina State University, Raleigh in 1986 and 1992, respectively. He has held positions at Edmund Scientific, RCA Broadcast Systems, RCA Advanced Technology Laboratories, and the Naval Research Laboratory. In 1995, he joined the Electrical Engineering faculty at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he is currently a professor who has advised over 120 MS and PhD graduate students at the NPS and other universities that collaborate with the Navy. He has authored more than 100 publications in radiation effects, digital, power and uW electronics and in semiconductor device reliability.
Weatherford has worked in many areas of electronics and semiconductor physics for military applications over 40 years. As a young engineer at RCA Broadcast Systems, he developed color television camera electronics learning from the pioneers of television. While at the RCA Advanced Technology Labs, he was involved in building the world’s fastest microprocessor at the time in Gallium Arsenide MESFET technology for DARPA which supported programs such as MILSTAR. In the Solid State Electronics Laboratory at NCSU, his MS and PhD work was hardening GaAs technology to soft errors from cosmic and Van Allen Belt radiation. At the NRL, he developed materials and techniques to harden GaAs electronics to the highest ever known level for any electronics technology. This technology was implemented in several national asset satellites. While at the NPS, Weatherford has worked with many DOD agencies and U.S. universities in a wide range of hardening electronics to radiation and other directed energy sources, understanding the failure of electronic transistor technologies, and developing new semiconductor devices for a wide range of military applications.
Technically, leading a team of NPS and NRL researchers that developed the most immune digital rad-hard electronic technology ever known implemented into DOD satellites. Footnote to that, seeing a satellite not implement this technology, and thus allow a certain terrorist to live another decade. Most fulfilling is developing the student’s minds by relevant classroom studies and working with top university faculty and students around the country. This is in conjunction with Navy sponsors while also implementing cross connection with ONR, NRL with PhD students to Midshipmen. Being here 28 years, I’ve seen students that have learned semiconductor electronics at the atomic level run with ideals, to their next commands and later to industry. Some have made impacts taking down adversary drones in the Persian Gulf, advancing transistor technology in the microwave and power electronics realms.
Understanding of this phenomenon impacts radar, Electronic Warfare and any electronics system that needs a power supply that is in a contested environment. NPS is in a unique position in that we develop minds to learn things that they did not know existed, and to understand the military application using previous experience on the job to tie it all together. A little like the Office of Naval Research Bird Dogs, that is another story that NPS was indirectly the seed.
This research efforts with Lt. Col. Maniego and with Ens. Davis are tied together. The General Atomics / NPS CRADA is related to electronics in contested environments, by Directed Energy or natural and nuclear weapon radiation effects. A previous student with an NPS research associate observed a unique effect via molecular dynamic simulations. Ens. Davis is further understanding the type of atomic defects induced by radiation that impact how electrons and holes transport in a semiconductor. Very intensive supercomputer simulations were done on the NPS Hamming system. The output of Ens. Davis’ simulations is placed in a higher-level code to predict the electrical degradation in transistors (Lt. Col. Maniego’s work). The simulations are used to determine the type and intensity of radiation required to design experiments to confirm our hypotheses. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, through Professor Grbovic in Physics, has picked up to support this effort. Other parties that have additionally contributed to this research effort in various ways are Penn State, ONR, VaTech, NRL, John Hopkins Labs, and Idaho State.
We have other projects that we patented with UC Santa Cruz to take light internal from a power transistor to provide optical control and temperature measurements and can determine electronic component degradation well before a catastrophic failure of power converters. Thus, the use of a Digital Twin technology for monitoring tens of thousands of sensors on a ship can detect maintenance issues much earlier. This technique also vastly reduces sensitivity to radio frequency interference from other systems or by Electronic Warfare.
They are the next generation, the more mentors they interact with, the more enthusiasm they gain and the better they learn. This is the same realm as having students attend conferences, but they get the bigger picture from interacting with DOD leaders and industry.
The CRADA is Top Secret so I don’t discuss, unless you visit us in the SCIF. But not something we want our adversaries to know about.
