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

My interest in engineering began back in the tenth grade when I took Principles of Robotics as an elective with who would become my favorite teacher in high school. “C,” as we all called him, started off the year with a crash course in basic electronics (good old Ohm and Kirchoff), schematic reading, component identification, through hole soldering, and breadboarding. From there we expanded into BASIC programming, LEGO Mindstorm kits, and custom made sumo robots. My favorite project was building a Mindstorm robot to “rob Fort Knox” which could follow a line, detect a gold painted brick, and lift the brick before running away with it. The class was definitely challenging but it taught me a great deal and eventually lead me to choose EE as a major in college.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

In short, all of them. Throughout my years at school I’ve used all sorts of test equipment including electronic loads, oscilloscopes, wafer probe stations, spectrum analyzers, function generators, etc., etc. A well equipped surface mount soldering station wins out as my favorite by a hair though. Soldering to me is pretty relaxing, as weird as that sounds, and I like being able to sit down, plug in my headphones, and sometime later have a (hopefully) functioning circuit ready to be powered up. While I’d dabbled in soldering back in high school it wasn’t until my first co-op that I learned to really solder anything and everything and it has proved to be an incredibly useful skill in the years since.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

• ExpressPCB for schematics and PCB layout.
• Matlab for data analysis, homework problems, filter design, lab exercises, you name it
• Dropbox for sharing lab data with my partners, keeping project files up to date on multiple computers, and having a backup of my most important files in the cloud.
• I’m also familiar with the Cadence IDE, and Spice, among other pieces of software though I don’t use them nearly as much as the ones I’ve mentioned above.

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

Typically it’s whatever is currently stumping me but I’m going to have to say getting a bandpass filter working as part of my thesis. I was attempting to use a current feedback amplifier, for its high bandwidth and slew rate, in a dual amplifier topology and as it turns out you’ll never get a working filter if you take that route. I was getting a bandpass shaped response but it didn’t come close to meeting any of the design specs I had set with my advisor. Trying to make the hardware match up with what my simulations were telling me was possible stumped me for quite a while until I took the time to understand how current feedback amps really worked internally and then my mistake became apparent. The simulations were lying to me and the capacitive feedback around one of the amplifiers was causing problems within the op amp and wreaking havoc on the overall filter response. Dropping in a conventional voltage feedback amplifier and slightly adjusting some cap values fixed the problem and the filter worked as expected. The experience definitely taught me to be skeptical of perfect looking simulations when the hardware doesn’t match up.

What is on your bookshelf?

My bookshelf contains quite a few titles but the ones I find myself reaching for most of the time include:

• Analog Circuits World Class Designs edited by Bob Pease
• Analysis and Design of Analog Integrated Circuits by Gray and Meyer
• Analog Integrated Circuit Design by Johns and Martin
• Design of Analog Filters by Van Valkenburg
• Troubleshooting Analog Circuits by Bob Pease

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

I guess the most general trick up my sleeve is to walk away from a project when I get stuck for too long and take a break. During school and co-ops I would often find that the answer to a problem would be obvious once I took some time to let my mind work on it subconsciously.

When laying out a circuit for the first time I love to place blank component pads throughout my circuit in key areas, space permitting. In my experience, however brief, my designs never work right the first time around and having the option of adding an extra passive, quickly probing a node, or easily disconnecting two circuit blocks makes the whole debugging process go much smoother. As I turn out new iterations and the design becomes more finalized I’ll gradually remove the extra pads until only the final circuit is left.

What has been your favorite project in school?

Designing and laying out a DAC was my favorite project while at school. I was taking Mixed Signal IC Design during the winter of 09-10 and our professor gave us a list of specs to hit and the basic topology of our DAC and told us to go to town. The DAC had to be 7 bits, current steering, and fit into a 1.3 mm x 1.3 mm area, and hit a few other specs too like power consumption and ENOB. In order to be considered finished my design had to meet all specs over 45 process, temp, and supply corners as well as passing DRC, LVS, and antenna tests in layout. Even though I was given the basic topology to follow, a ton of design work and optimization was still needed and trying to complete such a large project in only 12 weeks was definitely challenging. There were many long days and late nights especially towards the end of the quarter but it was worth it. In the end my DAC was one of 6 chosen for fabrication through MOSIS and now I have a tube of 5 DACs that I can call my own which is awesome. As an added bonus they don’t explode when power is applied though I’ve never fully tested any of the real specs.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

A little over a year ago while working on my senior design project (a 1/f noise measurement platform) my group had the issue of burning through 9V batteries pretty quickly as we hadn’t given as much thought as we should have to a low power design. Sick of spending money on new batteries we got the “bright” idea of trying to use a rechargeable 18V battery from a cordless drill to power our circuit. While attempting to wire it up to the PCB we managed cause a short somewhere leading to a big puff of smoke and a rather large spark. Thankfully no one was hurt but when we examined the PCB afterward we discovered that we had disintegrated about a half inch of trace on the power rail. Needless to say we went back to using bench supplies and 9V batteries.

How did your blog Fake EE Quips get started?

Initially I only managed a Fake EE Quips Twitter account which I used to post obviously false EE related “quips” my friends and I had come up while at school together. The blog itself didn’t come about until late March. Most of things I posted stemmed from goofing off during lectures. A professor would mention some piece of theory and one of us would come up with an absurd reason why it was true.

The Twitter only approach lasted for a short while before I ran out of quips to post on a regular basis; coming up with amusingly fake EE quips is harder than it seems. I still wanted to post new quips as they struck me but I’d much rather wait for a good one than crank out mediocre content. It was about that time I realized I enjoyed writing about electrical engineering, specifically analog related topics, and that perhaps I could write about useful things I had picked up while at school and out on co-op that other people could hopefully learn from.

One WordPress account later the blog was up and running and has been fairly successful so far. After some false start posts I found I would rather write about little touched upon topics (using 0 ohm resistors, cheap RF probes, BPFs) than cover the basics of electronics. I’m not setting traffic records by any means, but people are reading what I write and what feedback I have received so far has been positive. I’d like to be posting more often but with finishing school, working on my thesis, and starting a full time job, it seems like the blog gets pushed aside more often than not. Hopefully once I’ve settled in I can get into a more regular update schedule.

What are you currently working on?

Right this minute I’m working on finishing up my thesis. I’m building a proof of concept wireless key generation circuit designed for use in wireless sensor networks where resources such as power, area, and computational complexity are typically constrained. The design uses the random phase of a channel to generate the needed keys for securing communications between sensor nodes. My circuit is based off of previous work done by my advisor and a former grad student who proved that such a technique is theoretically possible. It’s been a pretty fun project and I’ve learned a lot about circuit design, layout, and communication systems while completing it. I aim to have everything wrapped up hopefully in the not too distant future.

A few weeks ago however, I started my full-time job as an Applications Engineer with Intersil in their design center down in Raleigh-Durham, NC working on switchmode converters. So far most of what I’ve doing is standard apps work (datasheets, app notes, reference designs, customer support, etc.) but I’ve been a few other projects too like feasibility studies for new products, testing specs over temperature, and investigating the stability of buck regulators.