Interview with Bill Hall

Weekly PULSE Issue

Interview with Thilo von Selchow - President & CEO
of ZMDI

Featured Engineer

Bill Hall

Bill Hall - Senior VP & GM of the Standard Products Group at ON Semiconductor

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

I actually got my start by mowing the lawn at an electronics distributor when I was in high school in the early 70’s. I was eventually offered a part-time job in the warehouse. When I graduated from high school the manager of the warehouse offered me a full time job at $135/wk. Since I had no idea what I wanted to do in life, I took the job with the goal of working my way into sales. After 2 years of being told I was more valuable in the warehouse then in sales, I decided it was time to go to college. During my time at the distributor, I had contact with many Electrical Engineers. They seemed really smart and drove nice cars and since I was good at math, I decided to become an Electrical Engineer.

In addition to starting college in 1975, I also got married, which meant I needed a source of income. I decided to pick Drexel University in Philadelphia because they were one of the few schools in the country at that time with a Co-op program. This allowed me to work full-time 6 months of the year while getting a BSEE. I co-op’d at RCA Missile and Surface Radar Division and got to do cool things like write software for a missile flight simulator along with some mundane jobs like peeling Rubylith. I eventually graduated from Drexel in 1980 and took a full time job with RCA.

Can you tell us about your work experience before becoming the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Standard Products Group at ON Semiconductor?

My first job was with RCA as a RADAR Design Engineer. I worked on a RADAR digital signal processor for 5 years. We began by designing the system on paper, pretty much using discrete Logic IC’s along with some EEPROMs and some bit slice micro-processors. The design was at the module level, so, for example, one module was a complex arithmetic multiplier, another was a target detector and so on. This was cool stuff because we actually used mathematics that you thought were just in textbooks, like real and imaginary numbers, Euler’s Theorem, and RADAR countermeasures techniques. After the design was complete, we simulated the modules in FORTRAN and eventually manufactured the modules and began test and integration. Test and integration lasted years and involved rotating shift work since these modules were installed in a commissioned navy ship (actually just a conning tower) in the middle of a corn field in New Jersey. Eventually the changing shifts got old and I went to work for Fairchild Semiconductor in Maine.

I was hired as an applications engineer but on my 1st day of work, my boss asked if I would be willing to be a marketing engineer for 3 months then I could go back to applications engineering. I said, “if the pay is the same, no problem even though I had no idea what marketing did.” I actually found that I liked marketing because you got to make a lot of strategic decisions. So after 3 months, I stayed in marketing and began to climb the ladder, working through various manager positions. Marketing exposed me to many aspects of the business, but the next step I wanted was to run a business. In 1987 Fairchild was sold to National and I took on several Product Line Director positions. I liked running product lines because you were essentially running a small company within a larger company. In these positions I was responsible for marketing, product development, design, product engineering, applications engineering, supply chain, and all the financial aspects of the P&L. It was real easy to tell if you were doing a good or bad job, just look at the P&L.

National Semiconductor spun off Fairchild in 1997 and I stayed with Fairchild, so I worked for 3 companies in the space of 10 years and never changed my phone number. I kept getting more and more product lines folded into my group and got promoted to Vice President of the Interface & Logic Group in 1999 and eventually created and co-ran the Standard Products Group in 2004.

In 2006 I moved from Fairchild in Maine to ON Semiconductor in Phoenix as Senior VP & GM of the Standard Products group. As they say; it’s a dry heat.

What have been some of your influences that have helped you get to where you are today?

My father instilled a good set of values and a good work ethic in me.

The warehouse manager that I worked for taught me not to worry about what other people are doing just focus on doing the best job you can and cream always rises to the top.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

Somebody once told me that if you are an engineer, you can do almost any job that is out there. It has worked for me. In my career I have been a radar design engineer, a semiconductor applications engineer, a marketing engineer, a product engineer, and have had management jobs with finance, quality, HR, supply chain and engineering functions reporting into me. All of these functions came with a learning challenge but kept life interesting.

What has been your favorite project?

Too many to count.

Can you maybe choose a notable project to describe?

My favourite engineering project was designing anti-counter measures hardware for a naval radar. I had to implement algorithms in hardware for target detection in a jamming environment, or detecting a target in cloud cover, or telling a target from a fake pulse that the target broadcasts back to you. It’s a very creative process and these modules that you design are like children.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

One experience that stands out was when I first moved to Fairchild in 1985 and became the Marketing Manager for ACMOS Logic. We were launching the FACT family (Fairchild Advanced CMOS Technology). A large competitor in Texas who shall remain un-named was late to market with their technology and made a big deal of the noise characteristics (ground bounce) in FACT. Lots of the marketing people at Fairchild said “don’t acknowledge the competitor’s claims and the issue would go away” but since I had recently been a system design engineer I was pretty sure the issue wouldn’t go away and our slow sales ramp was proving that true. So I began to tear down the competitor’s case one issue at a time. Things like noise in a lumped load test jig doesn’t simulate noise in a real system with distributed loads and only specific signals in a digital system would be affected by this noise and so on. I created a demo board that showed these factors and travelled around the world with an oscilloscope (and they were pretty big in 1985) and showed small groups of engineers the truth that this was a good technology if you take the proper precautions. Again, having just left the design community I knew design engineers don’t believe marketing hype and it was critical to show real waveforms in a live demo environment. This worked and FACT went on to be a good revenue generator for many years.

What are you currently working on?

My group is focussing on High Performance Power Discretes (IGBTs, MOSFETs, Rectifiers) and cutting edge Protection devices like ESD and EMI Filters. We have the industry’s first silicon Common Mode Filter. Also, packaging is real important from CSP to high power density packages and IPM’s (Intelligent Power Modules from our Sanyo acquisition).

Can you tell us more about ON Semiconductor and the technology they are developing?

Most of ON Semiconductor is focused on power efficiency: everything from power switching , power control, and power management to low power consumption.

We are working on LED Drivers and ESD protection for LED general lighting.

In the automotive realm we are working on sensors for lane departure and vehicle positioning, extreme high temperature controllers for in transmission & on engine applications and voltage regulation for infotainment & driver information.

In computing and wireless: cutting edge power management for that increases power efficiency and decreases power density. For example: we are developing technology for power supplies that will have less than 10mW of power loss in standby mode.

Other areas include power conversion for high end power supplies and motor control for industrial applications. We are also adopting technology that was developed for hearing aids to provide high quality audio output for cell phones.

On the packaging side we are working on chip scale packaging which reduces the volume of a diode by more than 99% from the most common SMT packages used today.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

One trend that I am seeing in the industry is that everything is getting smaller and more power efficient. The trick to devices getting smaller is more power dissipation in a smaller surface area. The trick to power efficiency is in complex semiconductor processes and techniques that facilitate faster switching speeds.

What are some new technologies we can expect to see from ON Semiconductor in the near future?

In the near future, we can expect to see wide band gap technologies, much more use of integrated passive components in filtering, oscillators and RF amplification. Also, advances in chip singulation will increase the number of die per wafer without changing lithography.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

The business cycles are getting shorter and more pronounced, supply chains are getting very complex, and it is getting harder and harder to squeeze the cost out of the products.

What are some of your hobbies outside of work and design?

Having lived in Maine, I must say that my biggest hobby is fishing. I have a vacation home on the coast and I like to go offshore fishing for tuna and sharks.

Is there anything that you have not accomplished yet, that you have your sights on accomplishing in the near future?

I am pretty satisfied.

Previous Next

PCB Tools

Passive Tools

RF Tools

Extras

Calculators

Math