Test & Applications Engineer — High-Power Switching

Test & Applications Engineer — High-Power Switching

Cenfire · Goleta / Santa Barbara, CA · On-site, lab-based · Full-time

The short version

We make a new kind of power switch. It is a silicon MEMS device: a CMOS-compatible spring that opens and closes in under ten microseconds, carries an amp per square millimeter, stands off hundreds of volts, hot-switches, and has been cycled past six billion operations. If you have characterized relays, contactors, solid-state switches or power semiconductors, you already know the measurements that matter: standoff, leakage, contact resistance, switching time, hot-switch life, thermal limits. Nothing off the shelf makes those measurements on a part like this. We need an engineer who wants to build the bench, the boards and the software that prove what this device can do, and then carry that knowledge to the customers designing it in. Nobody arrives with MEMS switch experience; you will learn the device here. What you bring is the high-power applications experience.

You will own both sides of the DUT. On one side: the load boards, interposers, fixtures, instrument control and automated measurements that characterize and qualify the switch. On the other: the evaluation kits, reference designs and driver circuits that put it into a customer’s module. A Product Engineer will hand you a characterization request: what we need to know about the device and under what conditions. You will take it from “we need to measure this” to a repeatable, version-controlled setup that produces data they can trust, and you will take a customer problem from first call to a proof of concept our design team can productize.

What you will do

Characterize the device. Design and build benchtop setups for high-voltage standoff, high-current conduction, temperature versus current, switching time, and low-leakage measurement in the pico- and femtoamp range. Run new die configurations through the voltage, temperature and cycle corners the Product Engineer asks for. Analyze just enough to prove the setup is measuring what it claims, repeatably, then deliver the data.

Build the test hardware. Design, lay out, bring up, debug and rework PCBs: load boards and multiplexer boards for our in-house single-insertion tester, interposers for the RF evaluation board, thermal and high-power fixtures. Specify and manage the board houses and assembly subcontractors who build them. Document what you build so the next engineer can run it.

Write the software that drives it. Instrument control over VISA and SCPI for SMUs, electrometers, high-resistance meters, programmable supplies, electronic loads, thermal chambers and scopes. Measurement workflows and GUIs for the evaluation kit. Data pipelines that get results from the bench to the Product Engineer in usable form, starting with a thermal-analysis pipeline for our high-power switch array. Everything in Git, everything with the safety interlocks a high-voltage bench requires.