Sergejs Leonovs

Meet Sergejs, Zero Point Motion’s new application engineer, who will be helping to design the hardware for testing and integration of the Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) and micro-electro-mechanical (MEMS) inertial sensing architecture.

Sergejs studied electrical electronics at the University of the West of England, finishing his BSc in 2019. He then went on to the University of Bristol to do a master’s degree in power electronics, a field which deals with large-scale electrical systems, from those found in electric cars to the power grid itself. As part of his thesis, he worked on the active gate drive of GaN Power Devices.

After completing his master’s degree in July this year, Sergejs joined Zero Point Motion in September. “I describe my role as being a bridge between the PIC team and the final device that will be developed,” he explains. “As an analogy, for something like a camera to work just an image sensor is not enough, you also need supporting circuitry for power delivery, system control and data transfer to the end user device. Hardware design for the PIC is no different.”

Similarly, while Zero Point Motion’s silicon experts will be developing the optomechanical chips that can sense acceleration and rotation, Sergejs will be building the circuits for the chip bring-up, control and evaluation. This hardware will be key to accessing and processing the data, as well as performing other functions like monitoring the device’s power consumption.

Sergejs will be drawing on his previous experience of hardware integration, which he gained through consulting other companies as well as working as lead hardware engineer at a passive acoustic monitoring company during his BSc and MSc. While there, he worked on power telemetry and embedded processor design as well as signal acquisition and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) – integrated circuits which are designed to be reprogrammable to specific application requirements after manufacturing. This feature is especially desirable for fast signal processing and large data transfers.

Sergejs says he was drawn to working at Zero Point Motion because of the greater involvement in the whole process of development that it offered him. “If you work in a big established company, then there is a high chance you will be just one small cog in the machine with a narrow focus,” he says. “Whereas in a smaller team advancing a new product, you get more control of the development process as well as technological insight that is unmatched.”