What do you like best about your job?
Two things come to mind in particular. Being part of a really amazing team is fantastic. This is my first job coming out of college, if you include my internship here, and I have been very fortunate to experience what I would say is the ideal working environment at Teledyne Space Imaging.
Everyone knows so many things and is happy to share their knowledge with each other. Some people at the company have been there for more than 20 years. Being part of such an intellectual and knowledgeable environment has been incredibly rewarding for me. The second element is getting to design complicated circuitry and seeing it work in a real-life application. That is very satisfying!
Teledyne is well-known as a company for its internship and apprenticeship schemes, not just in the US, but also in the UK and elsewhere. What do you think the advantages are of doing an internship like yours, especially in the space industry?
It helps you ‘get your feet wet’ straight away and understand what it’s like working in the space industry and in a real-life working environment. At Teledyne, I wasn’t restricted too much in what I was allowed to do. They gave me the full experience and trusted in my knowledge and skills. It was really valuable for me to get that type of industry experience even before I had finished studying. It was a totally different world than being in full-time education and I appreciated having that experience early on.
The space sector can be a niche market, and internships like mine can offer really interesting opportunities for people starting out in their careers. I was allowed to work on some quite technical projects and be a part of a diverse team making some amazing products.
What type of projects are you currently working on?
The company as a whole is involved in a lot of missions, from space agencies to commercial startups. I am working on a variety of programs associated with these, building on our existing technology and developing it to work on ever more sophisticated missions and projects in space. Depending on the complexity of each project, it can take three months to a year to complete. Typically, you can spend half a year or more designing and testing a product, before you see it go up into space, which is the stage that many of our projects are at right now. That’s very exciting.
What are the main skills that someone would need to work in your area of expertise?
The most important thing is a strong foundation on CMOS circuitry and understanding the whole architecture of it. When we design our ROIC, or read-out integrated circuits, we use CMOS as the foundation of everything we do. You must also have a good comprehension of electrical engineering, not just basic knowledge.
In addition, you need to understand other concepts from the world of physics, such as capacitance or resistance. These are real-life concepts that you will need for your designs and calculating the right loads to make them work. It’s easy to design something on a computer in an ideal environment where the simulations all work perfectly. However, your design must work in real life, where there are more factors involved. So, all your calculations must be accurate and your knowledge of physics is essential to enable you to achieve that.
How do you see your team growing and developing over the next few years?
We are definitely growing in our team in terms of the number of proposals and programs we are working on. There is a lot happening with multiple customers and different types of projects underway. We are working on a lot of different areas and employing lots of new technologies and processes to meet customer requirements around power, size and other design specifications.
As we move to smaller sizes and specifications, this enables Teledyne Space Imaging to create products that require less power to work, can operate at a quicker pace and offer more capacity and circuitry in the same physical space. This is a rapidly growing area for us and others working in the space sector.
What is the best part about working in the space sector?
For me, it’s all about seeing the results of your hard work actually up in space. One of our most exciting recent projects has been the James Webb Space Telescope, which has a lot of our sensors on it. Seeing the images that the telescope is taking using our sensors is amazing. You see them appear on the internet and can feel proud that your company played a huge part in making them happen. Knowing that each of the projects you work on will one day join that telescope in space is something truly exciting – and unique to this sector.
