Interview with Dr. Martin Schauer

Featured Engineer

Martin Schauer

Interview with Dr. Martin Schauer - Principal Applications Engineer

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

95% of the time I use CST STUDIO SUITE, but occasionally I also use Matlab, Excel or Google Spreadsheets

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

As a software developer I implemented lumped elements into a frequency domain simulator. While debugging my code I noticed that all the numbers came out correctly, but the sign of the result was wrong. Of course, I could just have corrected this in the final equation, but instead I spent three days of debugging to make sure all the intermediate steps were correct as well. Just looking for a sign error was the frustrating part, especially as it was very hard to find and I always felt like I am already 99% there. I was expecting to find the bug any minute. At the end it turned out that one of the excitations for my sample problem was in the wrong direction – the code had been correct all along!

What books are on your bookshelf/desk?

This is an interesting question and it made me just wonder whether the majority still buys paper books or if they have changed over to ebooks. I consider myself to be conservative in this point and have to admit that I have not switched to ebooks yet. The usage of ebooks is tempting of course with all the advantages of digitization, such as carrying all my books with me, full text search over my whole library and immediate purchase options. It is probably only a question of time before I will change. Then I hope that services for book digitization will have emerged and will be affordable. It would be a shame to neglect all the paper books I currently have. Sorry for getting side-tracked on this topic; I will now return back to the original question.

Normally I buy about three books per month. Looking at my bookshelf, I would estimate that 50% are electrical engineering books, 20% are general engineering, 10% are general science, 10% are travel guides and 10% are miscellaneous. I should mention that during a recent move I sold many non engineering books. This certainly causes a shift towards the engineering books. I have rarely thought of reading a novel a second time, but with engineering books I just never know if I might need exactly this book for the next project.

Then there are the books I currently use for my work. At the moment the following ones are on my desk:

Sanders & Smidt: Statistics, very good book for a statistics refresher
Novak/Miller: Frequency-Domain Characterization of Power Distribution Networks: Important book in the new and emerging field of power integrity
Tom Thomas: Rough Surfaces, classic book, useful to understand copper material roughness better.

What has been your favorite project?

I am lucky to have a job that challenges one with every new project. And I have liked all my projects up till now, so the answer to this question would always be: “the last one”. In fact, the last project was a collaboration with Isola and INAOE on a paper we are going to present at Design Con 2011 entitled “Stack-up and routing optimization by understanding micro-scale PCB effects”. We participated and got involved into this at a very early stage. The simulations for performance evaluation were done before the layout of the board was designed. The idea was to predict the behavior of various micro-scale effects of PCBs by simulation and prove this by measuring the prototypes. I am glad to report that it worked out very nicely. I am looking forward to Design Con 2011.

What are you currently working on?

Currently I am working on modeling and simulation of copper surface roughness. With increasing data rates in communication systems, this has become an important topic in PCB Design. Due to the microscopic nature of the roughness, accurate simulation is extremely challenging, hence there is a need for roughness models. However there is another complication in developing these models: In all measurements of these circuits dielectric and metal losses are always combined, which makes separating the contributions difficult. I hope to help generate a better understanding of copper surface roughness by simulation. There you can easily separate the losses and also easily study different micro structures. At the end of course this should also match existing measurements. Definitely an interesting topic and based on the discussions I have with our customers it is also very important for any PCB designer at gigabit data rates.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

We all see that systems get smaller and smaller, e.g. my cell phone has more computing power and more memory than my 5 year old home computer. This consumer driven miniaturization leads to smaller components, e.g. on-chip lithography. Given that the frequency remains constant, this means that more and more components are in close vicinity, due to a higher packaging density. This then creates electromagnetic compatibility challenges to isolate the components as well as possible. At the same time also thermal and mechanical challenges arise. Therefore the typical divide into components and conquer approach will fail. Instead a much more unified system level approach needs to be considered to tackle many issues at the same time.

When did you decide to become an engineer?

That question somehow reminds me of the Dilbert episode “The Knack”, where Dilbert and his mother went to the doctor when Dilbert was a young boy . She was very concerned about him, because he built a ham radio out of other parts in the household. Once he also fixed the doctors EEG, the doctor immediately diagnoses him as “an engineer”.

I was not that “bad” as a kid, but was always interested in the technical background of everything. Around the age of 13 I started with an electrical experiment set and started building first circuits incl. first contact with a soldering iron. A couple of years later I became interested in personal computers. I know that I spent a couple of nights programming as soon as I got my first computer. At that time you got new software by purchasing a magazine and retyping the printed program into your computer. Floppy disks were just too expensive. Fortunately, this has changed. Then after high school I of course started studying electrical engineering. My main motivation at that time was to build the world’s best CD player. This was the time CDs just came out and vinyl was still considered to have a better sound.

In summary, I don’t think there was a single event which created the engineer in me, but it was more a natural progression by following my own interests.