Tell us something about your childhood and your career in Sri Lanka before coming to New Zealand?

I was born and brought up in Sri Lanka. My childhood memories are from two southern coast towns in Sri Lanka, with white sand beaches. When I lived in the city named Ambalangoda (in Sri Lanka), during the month of May there was an annual Buddhist festival (called Vesak) where the communities erect big “pandals” depicting lord Buddha’s life. These pandals were beautifully decorated with flashing lights, and as a kid I saw a wooden roller behind each pandal which was used to switch lights in beautiful flashing sequences and I got attracted to the technique used. At the age of 6 years I used to collect batteries, bulbs and empty little wooden rollers used for sewing threads to build my own flashers to light up my own mini-pandal. With this work, I was learning and enjoying simple principles of electricity at an early age.

When I was going to primary school and walking back home across the town with friends after school, I used to dig garbage bins of radio repair shops in the town to pick discarded components (which I didn’t know that they were resistors, capacitors etc). I enjoyed playing with them, and by the age of ten I was able to use step-down transformers instead of batteries to light up bulbs. {On her monthly pay day my mother [a school teacher] gave only little money to buy batteries and bulbs to play, but the batteries were short lived!}.

By the time I was in the intermediate school I was able to build mini-versions of toy motor driven flashers to illuminate my own little pandal during the Vesak season. All these little things made me interested in becoming an engineer, and my (relatively poor) parents supported me achieving a university education, thanks to the free education system in a poor third world country.

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

My mother encouraged me to go to a good school in the capital city Colombo and I did well in maths and physics and got enrolled as an engineering student at the University of Peradeniya in the beautiful hill country of Sri Lanka. By the time I entered the university in 1972, I was determined to be an electrical engineer and I enjoyed the subjects like electronics, communications. My childhood experiences helped me appreciate and enjoy these subjects. Though one of my politically oriented university maths teachers (only one of them) killed my enthusiasm in mathematics gradually (they didn’t motivate me in learning maths at university 4th year), I kept my serious enthusiasm in electrical subjects and successfully “completed” the degree, though I didn’t get a first class. {I enjoyed my university residential life to the maximum, which I never regret, though I missed my first class}

Moment I graduated I was employed as a tenure tracked assistant lecturer at the University of Sri Jayawardanepura to help developing an applied physics course. But I didn’t like teaching and joined the Dept of Civil Aviation as a graduate-programme electronics engineer.

To sum up my experience at the area control centre, as a young electronics engineer, please let me extract a quote from my 7th book’s (by the US publisher, CRC Press. FL) preface :

“In mid-1976, I was a young EE graduate starting my first industry job at the area control

Centre of the Department of Civil Aviation in Sri Lanka. When I met my senior engineer, B. L. Ramanayake, on my first day of work, he took me to the Alcatel KLB-5 Message Switching System, a monster TTL IC-based real-time computer system (no microprocessor-based systems were there at that time), and showed me a massive 30-volume documentation set. He said when the system fails, you have read these documents and repair the fault. The system was a large set of equipment cabinets full of basic TTL families and core memories, with just double-sided PCBs, linear power supplies, and wire-wrapped back planes supported by a 20 kVA UPS system with a massive battery bank. As a fresh 22-year-old graduate, I was stunned, since I have not taken a course on computer science, and thought of the amount of data to be referred to in a repair attempt.

Within a year, after five months of training in a subsidiary company of Alcatel in Paris, when I started attempting fault diagnosis on this monster system I realized that what Ramanayake said on my first day of work was absolutely true. For a period of more than five years, I detailed logic circuits, analog power supplies, UPS systems, and applied the hard-earned practical know-how in my repair attempts. The instrumentation available was only a 300 MHz Tektronix scope, multimeter, and a PCB tester. At every fault appearing in my system, I felt that I was not a true engineer until I was able to fix it”.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

I am a do it yourself person, and I enjoy trying any tool or instrument that fit any of my needs. In 1985 when I joined the Arthur C Clarke Institute for Modern Technologies (ACCIMT) I was to develop a whole new laboratory infrastructure for R& D and this made me learn about many new electronic test instruments, and also to repair them when they fail. {To reduce shipping costs from Sri Lanka to outside service centres}. This made me learn a lot about what EE test and measurement gear could and couldn’t do. This practical learning was adequate enough to develop a new CPD course for engineers, and I later converted the course material into a book published by the IEE, London(now the IET) in 1996.

This exercise made me become a technical writer in the mid 1990s. In a few weeks time my 7th book will come into print by the CRC Press in Florida.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I trust in my fundamental knowledge and the “build and try” policy in electronic circuits. Software tools are only a secondary need in my work. I believe in the brain’s ability and the practical work than depending too much on software tools. I strongly believe that designing an analog circuit using simple fundamentals should be the first step, and then any software tools can only help me refining its specifications.

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

My first job at the airports in Sri Lanka was a memorable one with useful training in American, British and French locations. Working on a time sharing TTL based real time message switching computer system and the solid state navigational aids like VOR/DME were significant challenges. After installing several VOR/DME systems in remote airfields, I was to install a new VOR/DME at the (only) international airport in Sri Lanka, prior to the planned visit of Queen Elizabeth in 1981.

A conventional VOR is to have a uniform ground reflection area. However at the planned location, one third of the area was a lagoon with a different reflection coefficient. With the risk foreseen, I enthusiastically started on this new installation, due to the assurance given by my boss “we will cut another round of coconut trees if the error curve becomes bad”. We worked day and night, to reach the critical time target. DME’s final transmitter was based on light house tubes with an anode cap voltage of 5000V!.

Final alignment stage was hectic as the US flight calibration team was to enter the Sri Lankan flight information region in a few days time. Transistor drive stages for the light house tubes, never gave the full drive power of 1.2W, making us frustrated. I kept totally immersed in the problem and entirely forgot the fact that light house tubes were powered by an anode cap voltage of 5000V dc.

Suddenly I accidentally touched the anode cap and thrown off to the wall of the VOR hut!.

In the mid night I learnt the great lesson of safety!

Then we kept checking all the drive stage circuitry where some trimming resistors were installed at the calibration tests at Wilcox. The resistors were chosen from a wide range, and the factory test report confirmed us the selected value. After several hours of further checks and tune ups we didn’t achieve the target!. As the installation engineer now it was a serious challenge to me.

I took a different path— why don’t I change that trimming resistor to another value from the range they indicated. A colleague drove to the airport component store and came with a set of resistors and we started changing form the next value onwards and started tuning again. By about a one order value change, came the expected peak drive power at 4:00 am in the morning!. Next morning the instrument was on air for the US flight cal guys from Dieago Gartia!. [This equipment was lying in the non air-conditioned airport storage areas for nearly 18 months in a tropical island with relative humidity in the range of 80-85% ].

Though the equipment worked ok in the immediate vicinity, unfortunately flight calibration confirmed that the equipment did not perform within the maximum allowed error limit. Beyond 40 knots, the error graphs were running out of the range of the plotter in the flight cal aircraft!.

My boss was at his critical decision to improve the cite, by cutting too many coconut trees (with still no guarantee of error curve improving!) or to relocate the equipment!. But the boss was over-ridden by the CEO of the airports authority at a special meeting where I was asked to indicate my sincere professional opinion, based on my real world experience!.

We were asked to relocate the VOR/DME to a proven old VOR site within the immediate airport area!. As a young engineer I learnt the need to express your genuine professional opinion with an experienced judgment. We were ready for the queen’s visit with the new VOR/DME commissioned at the new site!

What is on your bookshelf?

Many books on new subjects, such as MEMS, NEMs, green energy and a few on analogue circuit design. I am not much of a fiction reader.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

When you develop a new analog/ mixed signal product or a technique, use your fundamentals and go on a step by step approach with prototyping. You may come up with great creative ideas. Don’t attempt copying and modifying circuits.

In 1976, while I was an airports engineer, I wanted to develop my own bench power supply. I started on a step by step approach to come up with a design which allows me variable output capability linear regulator. Basic calculations and prototyping worked well to achieve all basics. When I wanted to have fold-back protection, without a series current monitoring resistor, and, without increasing the number of transistors, I didn’t have much success for 5 months in my hobby project. My mind kept thinking of workable circuit concepts all the time!

One day when I was in a night rider bus in my southern home town, I got a good idea to use a zener diode in its leakage region. It worked and I recognized that I came up with a creative element in my circuit design. To test if I was creative or not, my final test was to write to a British or an American EE magazine to see if the idea gets published!.

This gave me my first ever magazine publication in the “design ideas” pages of Electronic Engineering magazine in UK. As a 24 year electronic engineer, I felt like a king when the acceptance letter came. That triggered my publishing life as a practical engineer, for which reason today I work as a full time academic in New Zealand.

What has been your favorite project?

Developing creative analog approaches for DC-DC conversion and AC-AC conversion. Our last most successful project was a low frequency supercapacitor circulation technique for enhancing the efficiency of linear DC-DC converters by a multiplication factor such as 1.33, 2 or 3. A recent US patent was granted for this technique and we trust that this has opened up a whole new r & D domain on supercapacitor applications.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

I was a person who gained valuable real life experience in analog and power electronic circuits in a “burning and learning” approach. Long time back I was repairing a 1kW switching power supply of a mini computer in the mid night. After detecting a difficult fault, I replaced a component and applied the AC mains to test it. A bad smoothing capacitor exploded and my family thought I was dead!. I learnt a good lesson that day on capacitor voltage ratings!.

Any one who influenced your career?

I was very fortunate to be associated with Sir Arthur C Clarke, as the patron of the ACCIMT during my mid-career at the ACCIMT. He was very helpful to me in my time as a Principal engineer, particularly by encouraging me to publish my work internationally. When I got my first book contract from the British IEE (now IET) he congratulated me and wrote a preface for the book, even before I commenced finalizing my first chapter. This was a significant encouragement for my book writing, despite the negative and jealous attacks on my work by a few superiors, to whom I learnt how to be compassionate as a Buddhist.

Arthur introduced me to Prof John Robinson Pierce, who was formerly at Bell labs, and who named the transistor. During a diner at a US west coast restaurant, John gave me the best possible advice on how to be successful in book writing projects. He told me two things “(i) if you are unable to summarise the contents of your book project on a back of a business card don’t start on the project. (ii) in the first project, be prepared to be rejected by the publishers, but don’t loose the courage.” These things were the best ever career advice I got in my 35 year long EE career!.

What are you currently working on?

We are working on several supercapacitor projects, all on non traditional applications. One ambitious one is to come up with fully linear and significantly efficient voltage regulator module with supercapacitor energy recovery. What we ideally like to have is the switch-mode efficiency in a linear approach. This is a far too ambitious R& D activity. Another area is surge resistant UPS designs with supercap energy storage.

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

Commercially useful and non traditional supercapacitor applications!

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

I feel that the creativity of the electronic engineering world will be badly affected by the over-emphasis by the younger graduates trying to fish information from Google and other web sites. This will affect the progress of circuit design creativity, since they don’t attempt to think using fundamentals.

Where will the world go in the longer term due to high tech?

Due to selfish business motives of large companies, promoted by the principles of “selling by obsolence”, high tech will ruin the environment due to unwanted EE junk.