Engineering fellowship aims to push technology for extreme environments

In a hotel lobby in West Palm Beach, Florida, Assistant Professor Karthik Srinivasan was reviewing a conference presentation slide with his graduate student, Miguel Mancias, when something caught his eye. The slide noted that commercial inductors marketed as "high-temperature" rarely operated above 250 degrees Celsius.

When Srinivasan asked why, his student had a simple answer: no one had looked past the Curie temperature, the point at which magnetic materials lose their magnetism entirely.

"That's when it struck me that we'd been looking at this problem from a single lens," Srinivasan said. "We needed to start looking at how we prevent the high temperature from ever reaching the sensitive device in the first place."

That lobby conversation became the seed of a new research direction, and now, a $280,000-plus National Science Foundation (NSF) EPSCoR Research Fellowship that will send Srinivasan and one of his graduate students to the University of Arkansas to develop a new generation of magnetic inductors built to survive conditions most electronics can't.

Karthik Srinivasan pictured in the Applied Magnetics and Photonics (AMPS) Lab at Boise State. Photo by Torin Alm

Small components, big problem

Inductors are among the most common, and most overlooked, components in electronics. They store energy in the magnetic field and are essential to everything from power converters to communication systems. As chips have shrunk, so have inductors, often by winding coils around a magnetic core that boosts how much energy they can store in a smaller footprint.

"Winding coils around a magnetic core is the only way to make an inductor. So when chips shrink, inductors struggle to keep up because the need for winding coils around magnetic cores cannot scale down commensurately," Srinivasan said. "Once you make them small, like how we will pursue them, they become more sensitive to temperature changes. So the problem is that you want inductors to be small, but then they become less tolerant of high temperatures."

Srinivasan's project focuses on "planar" inductors, flat, thin-film versions suited to modern chip design, that can withstand operating environments up to 600 degrees Celsius. That's a critical threshold for emerging applications like hypersonic propulsion, nuclear energy systems and spacecraft, where electronics must function reliably despite extreme heat.

"Once a magnet loses its magnetization, it's incredibly difficult to remagnetize it and nearly impossible once the component is already deployed," Srinivasan said. "We're trying to prevent that failure before it happens."

Rather than chase new magnetic materials with inherently higher Curie temperatures, an approach other researchers are pursuing, Srinivasan's strategy is architectural. His research will build thermally robust material platforms and packaging so the inductor's core never actually experiences damaging heat, even when the surrounding environment reaches 600 degrees Celsius.

The applications extend well beyond Earth. Propulsion systems for satellites, launch vehicles and probes exploring Venus or the Sun routinely face extreme heat despite thermal shielding. Srinivasan's group already collaborates with NASA's Glenn Research Center on a related question: identifying magnetic material compositions suited for these high-temperature operations.

Another central component to this research project is silicon carbide, a semiconductor material already favored in high-power electronics for its ability to handle high voltages and dissipate heat efficiently, properties preferred for extreme environments. Srinivasan's team will integrate thin-film magnetic materials directly onto silicon carbide platforms, then use advanced ceramic packaging to further shield the devices from thermal degradation.

Assistant Professor Karthik Srinivasan looks under the microscope in his AMPS Lab. Photo by Torin Alm

A cross-country partnership

The fellowship builds on a collaboration that began in 2024, when Srinivasan met Alan Mantooth while co-authoring a Department of Energy proposal. Mantooth's expertise became central to Srinivasan's subsequent NSF research. After a 2025 visit to Arkansas' Multi-User Silicon Carbide Research and Fabrication Facility, Srinivasan met David Huitink, a director of the university's High-Density Electronics Center, whose work in ceramic packaging rounded out the pieces needed for this new inductor project.

"Arkansas brings a wealth of expertise in silicon carbide fabrication, packaging and testing," Srinivasan said. "Boise State brings the ability to synthesize the magnetic materials and characterize the packaged inductors at high temperatures. These are complementary capabilities that are ideal for advancing this field."

"High temperature electronics matter now more than ever before because as technology has progressed, the desire of placing electronics in places that they would not have survived before has become more of a reality," Alan Mantooth, distinguished professor and director of the University of Arkansas's National Center for Reliable Electric Power Transmission, added. "This is particularly true for sensing and monitoring applications in harsh environments such as industrial processes, energy generation, energy exploration, and space exploration. Working with Boise State helps us grow the impact we can have in all of these application areas by utilizing our facilities to bring their creative ideas to fruition."

At Arkansas, Srinivasan and his graduate student trainee will learn wafer-scale fabrication and low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) packaging, skills new to his lab. Huitink's center houses unique capabilities for producing ceramic substrates that can withstand temperatures above 800 degrees Celsius, giving Srinivasan and his student access to packaging assembly methods and materials processing far beyond what's currently available at Boise State.

"Without the surrounding material infrastructure, or 'electronic packaging', to support semiconductor devices at high temperature, even the best-performing device is like a smartphone without a signal: capable of great things, but with no practical way to take advantage of them," David Huitink, director of the University of Arkansas's High-Density Electronics Center, said. "In the realm of extreme high temperatures, there are extremely few packaging options, since the interconnects, electrical insulation and conductors all have to survive the same hostile conditions the device does. The solutions have to be coordinated between the device, the packaging and the thermal system in order to be successful."

Back in Boise, the student will apply that knowledge across the full pipeline: fabricating inductors, synthesizing and integrating magnetic materials at the Idaho Microfabrication Laboratory, packaging devices, and testing them at the Applied Magnetics and Photonics Laboratory (AMPS) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Building Idaho's semiconductor future

The project dovetails with Boise State's growing semiconductor research ecosystem, complementing ongoing efforts like UPWARDS, AWESOME and NNME Pacific Intermountain through the college's Microelectronics Education and Research Center (MERC).

Srinivasan plans to fold fabrication and characterization techniques into existing semiconductor processing courses, and will host Mantooth and Huitink for two campus workshops on extreme environment microelectronics and workforce development.

"The involvement of students across every stage from fabrication, materials, and integration to packaging and testing, gives them a well-rounded experience in component engineering," Srinivasan said. "I also hope they learn how to be a better collaborator working within multidisciplinary teams."

By the fellowship's end, Srinivasan expects to have a packaged array of inductors reliably operating between 300 and 600 degrees Celsius, along with fabrication process flows and packaging design rules that could shape the next generation of extreme environment electronics, from Idaho classrooms to the edge of space.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation's Office of Integrative Activities (OIA) under award No. 2514716. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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