This position is part of the National Institute of Standards (NIST) Professional Research Experience (PREP) program. NIST recognizes that its research staff may wish to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest, thus requires that such institutions must be the recipient of a PREP award. The PREP program requires staff from a wide range of backgrounds to work on scientific research in many areas. Employees in this position will perform technical work that underpins the scientific research of the collaboration.
Research Title:
Building a Standard Testbed for Evaluating the Promise of Next-Generation Non-volatile Memory Devices
The work will entail:
Current memory technologies have limitations in read and write speed, volatility, density, power consumption, and data retention, which become more critical as more computing tasks are performed in or near memory devices. Emerging technologies aim to overcome these limitations with higher density, lower power consumption, faster read/write speeds, better endurance, and lower cost. However, many of these technologies are analog or stochastic, requiring new testing infrastructure, benchmarks, and metrics. Device-level development often occurs in small-scale research facilities or academic labs, making systems-level demonstrations challenging. Standardizing testbeds, benchmarks, and metrics could bridge the gap between research and industry, accelerating the development of next generation memory technologies. This work will develop a testbed for prototypical and emerging memory devices and a standard set of device tests and application benchmarks for evaluating these devices. The testbed will allow the testing of devices at the mesoscale, bridging the scaling gap between individual devices and systems.
Key responsibilities will include but are not limited to:
- Creating and managing designs for specialized, high precision, high speed data acquisition and control electronics instrumentation
- Designing and specifying integrated, FPGA-based circuit board measurement systems
- Developing hardware interfaces for a custom FPGA-based prototype system to verify, validate and conduct neural network experiments
- Developing software to verify and characterize magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) and resistive RAM (RRAM) devices
- Assisting in architecting and developing digital interfaces in FPGAs, and microcontrollers for several different experiments
- Collecting and analyzing data from the data acquisition systems
- Presenting results at internal meetings and meetings with external stakeholders
- Ensuring that results, protocols, software, and documentation have been archived or otherwise transmitted to the larger organization
Qualifications
- A Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering or a related field
- At least 5 years of relevant experience
- Familiarity with hardware interfaces for Xilinx FPGA-based prototype systems
- Advanced programming ability in Python, C++, and scripting on Windows, Linux desktops and embedded Linux systems
- Ability to code in Verilog VHDL and RTL using Xilinx Vivado
- Strong oral and written communication skills
The university is an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer that does not unlawfully discriminate in any of its programs or activities on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or on any other basis prohibited by applicable law.