Interview with Per Viklund

Featured Engineer

Per Viklund

Per Viklund - Director of RF & Advanced Packaging in Mentor Graphics Systems Design Division

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

Today I mostly use software tools in my work but if I should mention one tool it would be the paper clip. The paper clip is a highly under rated piece of technology that let you eject a stuck DVD as well as trigger the reset button of any hardware.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I really love working with new technologies in electronic design. Back in the 1990’s I was working with the development of new EDA tools for the design of RF and IC packages. We were really ahead of our times and this was a very challenging time but rewarding as I saw users succeed to produce advanced products more productively. In 2003 my company was acquired by Mentor Graphics and again I have the opportunity to lead in the development of some of these advanced tools.

I got a chance to do something very few people ever get to do: Re-design the same thing from scratch taking into account all you learned as well as all the technology advances. It’s really true as they say that second time makes it right.

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

Quite some time ago an assembled Printed circuit board with embedded passive resistors and capacitors expressed short circuit between one of the power nets and ground. After trying every trick in the book still failing to locate the short, we actually found the issue using a thermal imaging camera and slowly cranking up on the current limit of the power supply monitoring where the board got hot. This proves that problems are often very complex but solutions, if they work, are always simple.

What is on your bookshelf?

It’s continuously changing as technology changes. A long time I had Motorola’s ECL Handbook and Kernighan & Ritchie The C Programming Language and Sobel’s book on Unix System V I but found my self throwing them away years ago as they become obsolete to me. Some books have survived my cleaning frenzy and they are time less pieces like the ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook 1977 edition which I actually still use now and then.

That said, you can really find almost everything you need on the internet and that has become more and more my source of information. Not just stuff I Google but there are many very good on line books out there. I was a co-author to the “HDI handbook” together with several other technology gurus and that book has helped me many times.

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

My best trick is to listen and listen really carefully to your customers and the people around you. There is a reason why we have two ears and only one mouth! There are many cool engineering tricks out there but the fact is that no one can know it all but you sure can know someone who has the knowledge you are seeking.

What has been your favorite project?

I’m extremely passionate over my work and the object for my passion has always been my current project what ever it has been. I think I’m very fortunate that way. In 2003 I had the opportunity to create a unique tool for applying embedded components in circuit boards. This was followed with development of a completely unique solution for RF-digital-analog co design that still is way ahead of the competition. I then had the opportunity to work on a new 3D based tool for advanced packaging and tools for chip-package-board co design. They have all been favorite projects that has resulted in products that I and my team are very proud over.

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

I’ve fried hot dogs using the mains supply but I guess most engineers have.

I also still remember when a friend and I in school made home built 1kW ham radio power amps and found out just how far 1500V plate voltage will arc. I trust my friends hand has healed by now.

Speaking of blowing things up, I was once involved in a case where a communication central almost burned down due to a tricky issue. A large PCB had multiple voltages on it and among them two separate +24V circuits. A PCB designer (No it wasn’t me!) did not properly run the design rule checks and failed to notice that the two separate 24V circuits had been short circuited on the PCB. When the board was tested in the lab, the same +24V supply was used to feed both circuits and nothing happened. In the field, there were two separate power supplies and they had a small voltage difference –enough to set the board and a lot more on fire.

Lesson learned: Although the design rule check could catch the issue, it was up to a person to execute the operation. As always, the weak link is the human factor. Correct by design methodology with tools that automatically catches issues like this can really save your day.

What are you currently working on?

I can’t go into much detail and I constantly juggle multiple projects but right now I am focusing on helping a technology leading customer in deploying our design tools for RF and Advanced Packaging.

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

The challenges never stop. There is a constant evolution in the area of advanced packaging and PCB. It really isn’t that long ago that all electronics were soldered to ceramic solder posts. Today consumer products are built by leading edge companies using extreme PCB technologies. What we at Mentor see constantly is that the bleeding edge technology used rarely, eventually becomes common place and the time from bleeding edge to main stream becomes shorter and shorter. There is an obvious risk that the designers are stretched too thin and the challenge is to keep ahead of the curve and deliver tools that can help bridge designer expertise gap and also enable more and more groups in an organization to collaborate real time.

This is extremely important as we really add more and more technology into smaller and smaller circuit boards demanding this at lower product cost, lower engineering cost and also shorter engineering time. The only way to meet such requirements is by delivering more efficient design solutions. That has been our business for a long time and continues to be a main goal.

Clearly, the only way we can stay successful is by enabling our customers to be successful.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

Related to the previous question, integrating more links on the idea to product chain so that the impact of changes in one area becomes visible and can guide the others has become a must have and is a growing challenge. The time when a PCB design tool could be a stand alone point tool is definitely gone and the value of enterprise wide solutions is obvious.

Another challenge is that new technologies for electronic design, PCB and package fabrication are introduced almost by the month and clearly only a fraction of these will ever get a wider adoption in the industry. To choose way ahead of time what technologies to invest in supporting and which ones to ignore is a constant challenge. We can’t invest in them all and given release and engineering cycle timing, we can’t wait to see which technologies will win. We have to make early decisions. –This is something Mentor has been doing very successful in the past and plan to continue being successful at –but it is indeed a challenge.