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LIFE OF A TUBE GUY

I
f you’d told me I’d spend m y ca r eer working on vacuum
for Connected Hardware
tubes, I’d have said, ‘No way. That’s crazy!’ ”
So says Carter M. Armstrong, who has in fact spent the last
Designed to perform in 40-some years working on vacuum devices. It started in graduate
high vibration environments school, when his Ph.D. advisor at the University of Maryland
turned him on to electron beams. And it continued through
With surface mount solder tabs for
stints at North Carolina State University, the Naval Research
additional board retention strength,
Laboratory, Northrop Grumman, Litton, and most recently
Archer Kontrol can withstand L3Harris, in Torrance, Calif., where he is director of advanced
lateral and twisting forces in high development for the company’s Electron Devices division.
vibration environments. Throughout, Armstrong says, the work has been intellectually
stimulating and emotionally rewarding. “It’s good to work on hard
Ensuring reliability in the
problems,” he says. “The physics is hard, the engineering is hard,
next generation of connected
and it’s all interrelated. Not everybody can do this kind of work, but
devices.
it gets in your blood, it really does.”
n Temperature range of In the photo above, Armstrong, an IEEE Fellow, holds two of
-55°C to +125°C the devices he helped develop: a millimeter-wave mini traveling-
n Assists with blind mating wave tube and a microwave power module, both of which he
describes in “The 9 Greatest Vacuum Tubes You’ve Never Heard
n Tested to perform up to
Of” [p. 30]. Beyond the ubiquitous magnetrons in microwave ovens
500 operations
and the traveling-wave tubes in communications satellites, he says,
n Up to 3 Gbit/s data rate vacuum devices still find their way into a surprisingly broad array
of applications where “you need high efficiency, high power, and
wide amplification bandwidth.” Those applications include cancer
harwin.com/archer-kontrol therapy, fusion reactors, industrial heating, particle accelerators,
radar, missile defense, and electronic warfare.
Almost all of the tubes in Armstrong’s article are ones he helped
design or came across during his career, but he included one based
on the recommendation of his son Derek, a musician. That’s the
Telefunken VF14M, a specialized audio tube used in the much-
Connect with confidence revered Neumann U47 and U48 microphones. Over the decades,
many recording artists have favored those mics, including Ella
MICHAEL MARTIN

Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and the Beatles.

11.20

“I’m a huge Beatles fan, so I was more than happy to include that
one,” Armstrong says. ■

02  | NOV 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG
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