- Email:
- micblacc@iu.edu
Bio
I am a second-year PhD student at Indiana University in the Intelligent Systems Engineering Department with a specialization in Computer Engineering and a minor in physics. I obtained my Bachelor's and Master's of Science in Computer Science in 2020 as a part of Indiana Unviersity's Accelorated Masters Program.
After graduating, I moved to Atlanta, Georgia to work as a Research Engineer for Graf Research. My work focused on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) assurance, hardware security, and automated generation of hardware designs.
During my time in my PhD program at Indiana University, I have leveraged my experience with FPGA and high-level hardware design and expanded my expertise to circuit design and device operation. This has given me an understanding of how hardware operates at both the large and small scales.
One key to studying semiconductor devices is understanding the impacts of environmental factors on their operation. My current research specifically focuses on how microelectronic devices respond to the space radiation environment.
Research
IU CREATE Satellite Project
We have developed an initiative to enhance the reliability of microelectronics operating in space by establishing a critical link between terrestrial radiation testing and actual orbital mission data. Our work addresses Single Event Effects (SEEs), a significant challenge that microelectronics in space environments face from ionizing radiation. While terrestrial accelerator tests have traditionally been used to predict how devices will respond to radiation, we recognize that their real-world accuracy requires validation against actual space conditions. To this end, our team at Indiana University Center for Reliable and Trusted Microelectronics (IU CREATE) is collaborating with The Radaiation Team to correlate terrestrial data with real-world data by recreating radiation tests aboard a satellite.
Our first mission will utilize devices that have been tested extensively with terrestrial radiation sources. The first device is the RadFX Integrated Circuit, which allows refined measurement of Single Event Transients (SETs) is addation to gathering data on Single Event Upsets (SEUs). The other two devices that will be deployed are Static Random Access Memories (SRAMs) manufactured by Cypress and ISSI, which have also been extensively tested terrestrially and are commonly used to verify new radiation sources. During our mission, these devices will be controlled by an MSP430, which can perform the experiments, collect, and transmit data autonomously. Our experiments will utilize a modular design to be easily extensible to more devices in the future. Additionally, we have created a system to integrate our experiments onto planned satellite launches with minimal interference with primary mission objectives, allowing us to gather data about more space environments in the future.