Interview with Dr. Eric Bogatin

Featured Engineer

Eric Bogatin

Interview with Dr. Eric Bogatin - Signal Integrity Evangelist

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

TDR and VNA- essential for interconnect characterization

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

Agilent ADS, Mentor HyperLynx, Polar SI9000, QUCS

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

A ground bounce problem in a connector turned out to be due to an over etch by the board fab shop causing the clearance holes in the via field to overlap and removed any web in the return planes. This was one of the possibilities in our list. When we got down to it, we had to x-ray the board to verify it. It was obvious in the x-ray.

What is on your bookshelf?

Signal and Power Integrity- Simplified and Shadow Engineer

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

Most important step in debugging a problem is to ask the question, “If I wanted to create the same symptoms, how would I do it?” You look at the various ways and look to see if each one might be the root cause.

What has been your favorite project?

Writing my text book, Signal and Power Integrity-Simplified. I learned a tremendous amount writing the book. Most of it was written in a Starbucks in San Jose, in the mornings before I taught class.

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

Frank Lloyd Wright used to say, “I don’t need a muse to be inspired, I need a deadline.” I do my best work on a deadline. I once was CTO of a small sensor company. We were showing off a new controller instrument at Semicon and the morning before the show, my engineers were getting it hooked up to talk to the customer’s box. But, they would not talk to each other.

The show floor was going to open in less than 30 minutes. Our box was sensing the right thing and outputting the right control signals, but the other box was not responding. Their box specified a control signal was supposed to pull the line to ground. Our box did this with a transistor. Ten minutes before the floor opened, in thinking through all the possibilities, we thought maybe we had to not just pull the line to ground, but also supply the 5v level for the inactive level. Sure enough, we cut out a resistor from another board, twisted some leads together and tied them to the 5v on board supply. It worked.

As people were walking in, I was putting our box back together and shoving it under the table.

What are you currently working on?

I just put together three new classes on high speed serial interconnects, and included hands on labs for each class. My intern and I just finished the labs and testing them out and they are way cool.

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

We are migrating to offering more online training on signal integrity, and presenting more classes in Asia.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

Signal and power integrity problems are appearing everywhere, yet the number of engineers skilled in the art are not growing as fast as the number of problems.

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