Antenna Design Engineer
Position Title: Antenna Design Engineer (for Wireless Power)
Experience: MS EE with 3+yrs of experience or PhD with 0-3yrs industry experience Required
Location: Chicago, IL or Hybrid
Role Description: NuCurrent is looking for a Senior Antenna Design Engineer (for Wireless Power) who is motivated to work closely with a talented and diverse engineering group to develop the most innovative wireless power solutions in the market and deliver superior solutions to our end customer. The candidate will work very closely with senior electrical hardware, electromagnetics, software, and mechanical engineers to design and bring custom coils and systems up from scratch and take innovative products to market. They should exhibit strong cultural values that put the customer first, go beyond the standard, show strong ownership, innovate further, and demonstrate strong people skills.
Company Description: NuCurrent is a leading technology and IP company in the high growth field of wireless power and is the go-to provider of wireless power solutions for the world’s leading product companies. Spanning across industries including automotive, consumer, industrial, IoT, mobile, wearables and more, NuCurrent designs systems and key components for Fortune 500 companies and other industry leaders to enable wireless power transfer in new product releases. The Company supports product teams within large companies to bring wireless power innovations to market faster, with fewer risks, lower costs and better technology, while pushing the boundaries of system performance, charge speed, user flexibility and form factors. NuCurrent is a fabless technology company with a robust network of certified manufacturers and is an active leader in specification development across multiple industry standards bodies. NuCurrent has an energetic, purpose-driven work environment built by phenomenal people who go beyond expectations, are highly curious, deeply innovative and, above all, put customers first.
PRIMARY FUNCTION:
- Collaborate within a small, agile team of electrical, mechanical, software engineers, and project managers on impactful projects for some of the world’s largest companies. The collaborative environment allows for rapid feedback, innovation, and career growth.
- Design inductive wireless power coils for challenging applications in the consumer electronics, medical (implantable devices), industrial, and automotive industries.
- Responsible for ensuring accurate in-situ modeling of wireless power antenna designs. This includes modeling and optimizing coil designs in the presence of permeable and conductive materials, and meticulously evaluating design safety through analysis of SAR, and induced E-field/H-field.
- Contribute to NuCurrent’s proprietary technologies including Multi-Layer Multi-Turn, Through Metal Charging, Repeater (Metamaterial) technology, Cross-over and Multi-petal coil technology, EMI Comb filter designs, Interdigitated and Distributed capacitors.
- Utilize and contribute to Gena, our EDA tools, by developing, testing and validating Numag, our proprietary EM solver
- Bridge the gap between Antenna design and Computational electromagnetics by understanding output discrepancies, current distribution, meshing challenges, input boundary condition challenges, capacitive effects required to make the most efficient inductive links possible .
- Enhance and develop coil geometry scripts to expand Numag EM solver capabilities
- Develop physics‑informed neural networks with Numag data to steer our optimization algorithms—boosting accuracy while slashing computation time and resource use
- Model, measure and select coil materials such as permeable material, coil substrate material, permanent magnet core, and coating materials to minimize losses due to proximity effects, skin effects, and capacitive effects.
ESSENTIAL RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Lead antenna design projects from concept to production on time and to spec
- Ensure Simulation models correlate with Measurements
- Stay abreast of the latest advances in antenna manufacturing, topologies, and optimization to maximize performance and minimize cost
- Strong communication skills
- Collaborate with academic partners to contribute to our R&D projects
- Translate customer requirements into magnetic parameter constraints
- Evaluate coil design for EMI, SAR, Nerve Stimulation, manufacturability, and others
ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS
- Advanced expertise in EM simulation tools such as ANSYS (HFSS and Maxwell), CST, COMSOL, or equivalent EM tools
- Experience in Antenna design optimization
- Demonstrated ability to communicate complex ideas clearly and confidently to management, partners, and key customers
- Ability to write and develop strong code leveraging LLMs (MATLAB, python)
- Ability to work individually and in small teams
- Very comfortable with hands-on lab testing to validate simulations (applications related to wireless power, RFID, NFC a bonus)
PREFERABLE KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS
- Advanced expertise in computational electromagnetics, specially on Integral equation method solvers
- Experience in wireless power applications, knowledge of inductive coupling systems, RF antenna design
- Strong experience with RF equipment such as VNA, SA, RF amplifiers, Impedance analyzer
- Knowledge in modeling magnetic, dielectric, and conductive materials within magnetic coupling systems on EM software and assessing their impact on performance
- Knowledge of thermal management materials and experience in designing for thermal management
- Experience with Altium, Creo