Interview with Bill Peterson

Featured Engineer

Bill Peterson

Bill Peterson - Vice President, CTO at E&M Power

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

Electronics was in my blood even as a child. As a teen I was more interested in taking a TV apart to see how it worked than I was in watching it. Unfortunately, I was a very poor student in high school and when I graduated no college would have anything to do with me. Being 1A in the draft, at the height of the Viet Nam war, I enlisted in the Air Force and picked the field with the longest tech school, which was radar maintenance. When I separated from the Air Force, I managed to land a job as a technician at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the power lab. Drawing upon their huge depth of talent, I was able to absorb what I needed to function as an engineer. Becoming a member of technical staff, without even a bachelors degree, in the very highly academically oriented Bell Labs, is one of my greatest achievements. The power supplies at Bell Labs were primarily DC to DC converters operating from central office battery plants. I developed methods of forward converter transformer reset which paved the way for this workhorse circuit.

After working at Bell Labs what did you do?

After 14 years at Bell Labs, GE Aerospace in Binghamton NY found me and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, to give them an in-house power supply capability. The power supplies at GE Aerospace put a whole new meaning on the word reliability. At Bell Labs if your power supply quit, somebody’s telephone call got dropped. At GE Aerospace it was flight critical fly by wire controls and engine controls, and airplanes fell out of the sky if the electronics stopped working. I moved the part of GE I was in into power supplies and then into hybrid electric trucks and busses. When I left them in 1999 they were poised to become the largest hybrid bus supplier.

When did you get the entrepreneurial bug?

While I was designing power supplies for military and aerospace for GE I started a sideline business, Electronic Power Conversion, to design commercial power supplies. This worked well for years until I created my own conflict of interest by diversifying GE into commercial power supplies. So in 1999 I left GE Aerospace, which by then had changed into Lockheed Martin, and pursued Electronic Power Conversion full time. I moved in with another startup I was working with, Mechanical Power Conversion, which made permanent magnet motors and generators. A year later we merged the two companies into E&M Power.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

An oscilloscope is my viewport into the world of power electronics. Some of the capabilities of the new digital scopes are amazing, but so are some of the limitations. I’ve spent days tracking down an oscillation, only to discover it’s really ailiased high frequency ripple, but that same scope has captured a sub-microsecond transient in a 10 millisecond single shot trace that an analog scope could never have seen.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

Ghosts and intermittants are always the hardest bugs to fix. I did a 50 HP cooling fan inverter for a 1 million pound, 2 story high mining truck that worked fine in the lab, no matter what we subjected it to, but would occasionally trip out in the field. So I wound up at a coal mine on the top of a mountain in the Canadian Rockies with two battery operated oscilloscopes duct taped to the cab window trying to catch that elusive transient.

What are you currently working on?

We have developed an inverter that mimics the Back Electro Motive Force (BEMF) and the impedances of a motor. This inverter can load an electronic motor drive and the motor drive will think it’s driving a real motor. The DC current is recirculated back to the motor drive so that it’s not lost. This Active Load Emulator (ALE), as we call it, is being used in hybrid and electric car traction inverter development and testing.

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

I think the government budget mess will significantly curtail the military part of our business. I am hopeful that hybrid and electric vehicles and renewable energy power electronics will fill the void. I think efficiency will become the key parameter that will be driving designs. With the increase in grid tied inverters for renewable energy I think there will be a need to emulate the grid with all worst case values and transients for testing these inverters. The ALE motor emulator concept can be expanded to become an Active Grid Emulator AGE.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

I think this is a great time for power electronics. On the high power side, all of the renewable energy, smart grid, high efficiency vehicles rely on power electronics processing. On the low power side, every cell phone, tablet computer, and electronic gadget, needs high efficiency power processing.

Our challenge is to find next generation of engineers to maintain and expand this growth. Already there is a shortage of qualified engineers. Too many of our highly talented youth find the higher incomes of other fields irresistible and are not going into engineering. Forty years ago I entered this field on luck, not choice. While it was the most fortuitous occurrence for me, we cannot depend on such good fortune to bestow this choice on the multitude of engineers we need. We need to actively encourage engineering as a career choice. I think EEWeb is a valuable tool to get this word out.

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