Richard Ness

Richard Ness received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Texas Tech University in 1981 and 1983, respectively. He has over 26 years of industrial experience in pulsed power and power electronics technologies in both defense and commercial applications. He worked for 12 years at Maxwell Technologies, Inc. (now L-3 Pulse Sciences Division) on several large computerized data acquisition systems and on a variety of pulsed power and power conditioning projects. These included a 6 kV, 80 A regulated power supply; a 0.5 MW average power, 60 kHz solid state modulator; a 10 MW average power Hard Tube Regulator; a 350 kW average power, 600 kV Thyratron modulator; and a number of compact, Megavolt-class pulse generators.
He joined Cymer Inc. in 1995 where he staffed and led the Power Systems Engineering group until 1999. His work has included the development of high average power capacitor charging power supplies and the design of multiple (~10) generations of solid state, magnetic pulse compression modulators in support of Excimer laser and Dense Plasma Focus (Extreme Ultraviolet, or EUV) light source projects for the highly demanding application of semiconductor photolithography. More recently, his work was associated with the development of 6 kHz laser power systems.

At the present time, he is president of Ness Engineering, Inc. where he provides consulting expertise and develops custom pulse generator and power supply systems for a variety of customers and applications. He currently holds 41 U.S. patents related to pulsed power system development in addition to numerous other international patents and pending patent applications. He has also been named as the overall Technical Chair for the upcoming IEEE Power Modulator Conference in 2010. He is a Senior member of the IEEE and has held both Q and Top Secret security clearances.