President and senior engineer of Behlke Power Electronics is Frank Behlke. Frank is doing professional electronic design since more than 35 years and since 30 years he is specialized in pulsed power electronics and high-voltage semiconductor stacks. He is your first contact person in challenging projects.

Frank is an expert for analog electronics, pulsed power, EMC and practical electronic design. In the early eighties he worked as freelance engineer for several high-tech companies. He developed many measuring instruments for electrical and non-electrical measurands, control systems and switch mode power supplies for very different applications. But his maybe most interesting job was at the Universities of Frankfurt and Muenster, Germany from 1980 to 1987, when he worked as a privately employed electronic engineer for Prof. Dr. Ing. Franz Hillenkamp (†2014) and Prof. Michael Karas, who have been nominated for the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for the invention of the MALDI mass spectrometer, which became a worldwide instrument standard in chemical analysis.

Frank developed and realized the electronics in the early stage of this research project. He liked the job very much, but it became particularily exciting in summer 1985, when the scientists asked Frank to built a high-voltage pulser for some experiments with the ion lense of their LAMMA 1000 time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOF-MS). In the same time the very first Power MOSFET came on the market and Frank knew immediately, that this brandnew material could be the perfect base for another revolutionary new product.

Throughout the summer 1985 he experimented day and night with this new material and then he presented the first Fast High Voltage Push-Pull Switch in the institute, which enabled the researchers to conduct special experiments with the ion desorption process in the TOF-MS. The experiments were sensationally successful and they realised, that the instruments mass resolution can be improved dramatically by pulsing the acceleration voltage with a certain delay, a methode which experts call today delayed extraction. This discovery was the initial trigger for Franks firm.