Interview with Dean Klein

Featured Engineer

Dean Klein

Dean Klein - Micron Technology

How did you get into electronics? Were there any projects as a youth that got you excited about the field?

As a youth I had always been fascinated with radio controlled airplanes. When I was a sophomore in high school I had a Scoutmaster who worked for IBM and was also one of my newspaper customers. Several times I saw Heathkit boxes arrive at his home, so one day I asked if he would mind helping me get started in electronics and build a radio control. He said he didn’t have time for much, but agreed to get me started, which he did by lending me a breadboard box, a box of TTL logic parts and a Texas Instruments TTL Data Book. The parts were all marked with IBM’s proprietary numbers, so he also gave me a translation sheet for finding the TI equivalent. After a summer of dabbling with this I was no closer to building a radio control, but I had learned to wire wrap circuits and was having a lot of fun creating circuits. That fall I suggested to my High School Physics teacher that I build an accurate timer/counter for use in the lab. He went to the school board and got approval, and funding, so I built my first “product” as a Junior in High School. That was just the beginning!

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

PCB123, USB logic analyzer and scope

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

Microchip PIC IDE, Cypress PSOC

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

The trickiest bugs are almost always intermittent “system” bugs, which can include both hardware and software. One of the trickiest I recall involved the original ATA HDD interface and some things we had done to accelerate the interface. There was an unexpected consequence that the driver then received the interrupt from the HDD sooner than it expected it, which resulted in two bytes being lost once in a while. Of course, the driver code was not available and had to be reverse-engineered.

What is on your bookshelf?

A little bit of everything. My college physics textbook is there (No, it’s not a stone tablet!) along with management books and historical novels. Of course, these days, my reading is mostly electronic – for which I use my iPad.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve? (special way to analyze circuits, special process you use to make something, etc.)

I always try to hire the best and brightest “practical” engineers. I want the engineer who thinks outside the box and really knows how to get things done.

What has been your favorite project?

Developing SSD’s for Micron has been a real blast.

At a different level, mentoring the Bullbots FIRST Robotics team is a different sort of favorite project. FIRST Robotics is an international program that encourages science and technology with high school students. I originally became involved mentoring the Bullbots team when my youngest son participated as a junior in high school. Four years later I’m still mentoring the team and still having a great time. It’s always rewarding to work with motivated students, helping them to channel their ideas productively and teaching them new skills. The team participates in regional competitions with over 50 other teams and has generally fielded solid robots. In past years the regional competitions have been in Portland, OR. Last year the team competed in a new regional in Salt Lake City and will return there this year in early April.

The students show a huge amount of dedication to the FIRST challenge. They bring out all sorts of ideas and it’s very impressive to watch them develop over the years they’re involved in the program. With 6 weeks to get from challenge to shipped robot this is an intense program. In that 6 weeks they brainstorm, design, prototype, build, program and test their robot. Somehow the students are able to pull it off!

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences? (blowing up things, getting shocked, etc.)

I have a long list, but lighting my friend, Earl’s, desk on fire was something we still laugh about. Shortly after I had designed my first personal computer I had one of the boards running outside an enclosure on my desk. One of the tantalum capacitors had been installed backwards and decided to ‘pop’ off the board. We didn’t think too much of it until about 5 minutes later when Earl looked up to see a stack of papers in flames on his desk. The top of the capacitor had landed there and started the fire.

What are you currently working on?

That’s currently top secret. However, I had a heart attack last week, so I am currently researching and recovering. I think a good engineering problem is to figure out why a guy who’s in shape, a great diet and low cholesterol has a heart attack.

Tell us about a recent success?

Developing SSD’s has been that success. This was both a technical challenge as well as a managerial challenge. Prior Micron products have not incorporated firmware, so there was the added challenge of building a team that could develop both the hardware and firmware for the product. I’ve been fortunate to have excellent people to work with, so the project was also a lot of fun. The team successfully delivered two generations of products to market that have been both technically innovative and have offered superior performance. Of course, this success would not have been possible without a lot of support outside the SSD organization, teams like QA, manufacturing, marketing and sales.

What is going to be your next project?

That is actually a secret.

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

Being a part of a large company like Micron, with almost $10B annual sales of memory products, it’s difficult to imagine any radical shifts in the direction of our business. Memory is our area of expertise, and while we may have developments in other areas, memory must remain at our core for the near future. Of course, the technology of semiconductors certainly presents enough new challenges to make the business interesting. Shrinking memory circuits to reduce cost – as the industry has done for over 30 years – is becoming more difficult with each generation. At some point shrinking in the X and Y directions will stop, forcing further integration in the Z direction. 3D integration of chips will initially be exercises in packaging, but will grow more complex with thru-silicon-vias (TSV’s) and monolithic 3D. It’s fun to be a part of this!

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

I guess I hinted at the technical challenge in the previous answer. The end of scaling carries with it an enormous economic implication for the industry. Scaling has always allowed the industry to offer more capability for a lower cost. So we are approaching a time when scaling will slow – yet the innovation around products and new uses for technology will continue to happen. To me, this appears to be an opportunity for more efficient use of the silicon resources we have available. I believe we’re already seeing this happening. Take, for instance, a new smartphone or tablet computer. These are platforms that do more – with less. They have only a fraction of the silicon area of a PC, yet for most people these platforms can totally take the place of a PC. Cloud computing is yet another example of doing more with less. The cloud is a distributed computing environment that allows an efficient use of the computing resource by thousands of users. On the memory front, technologies such as Hybrid Buffered DRAM allow more power efficiency and performance efficiency from the memory subsystem. Bottom line: There is no shortage of new challenges for the industry!