College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Designing electronics

Gary Sleege's work with the Department of Physics and Astronomy nets him a LAS P&S award.

Most of Gary Sleege's 20-year career at Iowa State may have been spent working with the Ames Laboratory as an electronics engineer, but he worked a vast majority of that time with faculty members in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Sleege has played a key role in designing of electronics equipment allowing faculty in the department to work with major collaborative efforts across the globe.

Then three years, ago, the department Sleege was affiliated with in the Ames Laboratory was closed down.

In response, the Department of Physics and Astronomy formed its own Electronics Design Center, and the primary "motivation for doing so was to be sure that Gary could continue to work on such projects for our faculty and students," wrote Eli Rosenberg, professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

"If they (physics and astronomy faculty) have an experiment going, normally you get to a point where you need someone to design some unique electronics circuits," Sleege said. "These are things that you can't just go and buy, you have to have someone design them for the experiment."

Among Sleege's (and co-worker Harold Shank's) contributions in recent years to the research efforts conducted by the Department of Physics and Astronomy faculty are the design of the late energy trigger for an experiment to search for strange quark matter, the design of a first-level trigger for the PHENIX experiment, which is searching for evidence of the existence of the quark-gluon plasma at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the development of a control system to protect the sensitive photomultiplier tubes being used in the gamma-ray telescopes known as VERITAS.

Those contributions were among the reasons why last spring Sleege was named a recipient of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Professional and Scientific (P&S) Service Award.

Sleege says the need for each of these innovations is the same.

"There is so much data coming in on these experiments," he said. "It"s also coming in so fast that there is no way that you can begin to save it all and analyze it quickly enough."

Instead Sleege and the rest of the Department of Physics and Astronomy’s Electronics Design Center developed the "trigger." This device allows researchers to select only the data that they are interested in.
His designs of Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits for various scientific experiments involve the processing of very large volumes of data from diverse sources.

"The 'trigger' filters extraneous information," Sleege said. "It looks for pieces of data the researcher wants."

In addition to his work with physics and astronomy faculty members, Sleege also played an important role in building a replica of the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC) as one of the project's three lead engineers. The objective of the project was to build a full-scale, working replica that resembled the original ABC in appearance and functioned exactly like the original, using as many identical parts as possible.

This proved to be a major challenge, since the original computer no longer existed and the engineering documentation was far from complete. Relying on old photographs, recollections and descriptive papers from Antanasoff’s files, Sleege and the team completed the replica in April 1997.

"Producing a replica of the ABC was the most fun thing I've worked on here at Iowa State," Sleege said. "It was as much of a Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson project as it was scientific design."