Who are we?  

Well, we are really just me, Rick Raffanti, aerospace electronic engineer for a few decades now.  I'm nominally a one-man shop, but I usually collaborate with scientists and other engineers, and over the years I've established and maintained relationships with trusted technical professionals to do specialized tasks, such as PCB design, electronic assembly, and software development.

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Here's what I do:

  • Analog design, DC to a few GHz
  • Low noise design
  • Data conversion (analog/digital and digital/analog), in the GSPS range.
  • Large FPGA (Virtex 7) system design, including firmware and embedded processors
  • Complete system design, hardware including the above, with an API interface.
  • Aerospace designs.  I was employed at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Lab for 14 years and was responsible for many space-flight systems.
  • Careful documentation 

Selected Publications:

Dual band 550/1200 GHz wideband spectrometer for planetary observation
Erich T. Schlecht, Vahraz Jamnejad, Robert F. Jarnot, Jet Propulsion Lab. (United States); Bertrand C. Thomas, Radiometer Physics GmbH (Germany); Richard Raffanti, Techne Instruments, Inc. (United States); Robert H. Lin, Imran Mehdi, Jet Propulsion Lab. (United States)
Proceedings of SPIE Volume 8496
Paper 8496-29  (Sept 2012)

A readout for large arrays of microwave kinetic inductance detectors
Sean McHugh, Benjamin A. Mazin1, Bruno Serfass, Seth Meeker, Kieran O’Brien, Ran Duan, Rick Raffanti, and Dan Werthimer
Rev. Sci. Instrum. 83, 044702 (2012); 

Centroiding algorithms for high speed crossed strip readout of microchannel plate detectors.
John Vallerga, Anton Tremsin, Rick Raffanti, Oswald Siegmund
Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A Accelerators Spectrometers Detectors and Associated Equipment 05/2011; 633(S1):S255-S258

Large-format high-spatial resolution cross-strip readout MCP detectors for UV astronomy
by John Vallerga, Rick Raffanti, Anton Tremsin, Oswald Siegmund, Jason McPhate, Gary Varner
Proceedings IEEE 29 July 2010 Volume: 7732, Pages: 773203-773203-12

High Speed Multichannel Charge Sensitive Data Acquisition System with Self-Triggered Event Timing
Anton S. Tremsin, Oswald H.W. Siegmund, John V. Vallerga, Rick Raffanti, Shimon Weiss, and Xavier Michalet
IEEE Trans Nucl Sci. 2009 June 16; 56(3): 1148–1152.
 
Performance of the double delay line microchannel plate detectors for
the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer
 O. H. W. Siegmund, M. Gummin, J. Stock, G. Naletto, G. Gaines, R. Raffanti, J.
Hull, R. Abiad, T. Rodriquez-Bell, T. Magoncelli, P. Jelinsky, W. Donakowski, and
K. Kromer
SPIE. vol. 3114, pp. 283 - 294, 1997.

BerkeleyEUV spectrometer microchannel plate detectors for ORFEUS (Proceedings Paper)
J. Stock; O. H. W. Siegmund; M. Hurwitz, R. Raffanti; C. S. Bowyer; M. Lampton
Proc. SPIE, 2006, 128-138 (1993)

High-resolution Y-axis readout for delay-line microchannel anodes  
R. Raffanti and M. Lampton
Rev. Sci. Instrum. 64 1506 (1993)
 
A high-speed wide dynamic range time-to-digital converter  
M. Lampton and R. Raffanti
Rev. Sci. Instrum. 65 3577 (1994) 
 
Delay line anodes for microchannel-plate spectrometers  
M. Lampton, O. Siegmund, and R. Raffanti
Rev. Sci. Instrum. 58 2298 (1987)