Interview with Robert Bleidt

Featured Engineer

Robert Bleidt

Robert Bleidt - General Manager, Audio and Multimedia Division, Fraunhofer USA Digital Media Technologies

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

I built electronics projects when I was a child, like many engineers. A more interesting question would be: When did I stop? Most design engineers would say I am not a real engineer today because my work is in marketing and general management. In my experience, many engineers do not respect marketers and many marketers don’t respect engineers. This is regrettable, since the best engineers I know, either intuitively or through research, understand their markets very well.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

When I was an engineer in the video industry, the tool of choice was the Tektronix 2245 Option 5 oscilloscope. I had the one with the built-in frequency counter that would take a 3.58 MHz reference clock from a frequency standard. For digital debugging I used an HP 1650 logic analyzer. I still have those, along with a Tek 7L14 spectrum analyzer, an HP network analyzer, and a lot of TV-specific test equipment in my garage.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

ICE-boxes were never truly attractive for my projects, and I eventually abandoned them for printf’s to log files and toggling output port bits on specific events. Over the years, I used a number of PC cross-compilers. I left day-to-day engineering work when embedded linux was becoming popular. These days, as a marketing guy, I use Etheral/WireShark to do reverse-engineering on occasion. I have made some mailing list projects using Perl, which is a fairly complex language to learn if you want to use it completely. An advantage is that it has a lot of useful code modules you can download and use. I also use Visual Studio C++ – I’m not exclusively Perl.

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

No bugs seem hard to me after they are solved and usually forgotten. I remember the mistakes. I wasted a lot of time once trying to build a DSP circuit to replace an analog one, because the industry leader in the field promoted their new digital solution as better. After weeks of work, my new digital solution was still worse than the old analog one. I obtained a few minutes with the leader’s product and took it apart – their new circuit was just as bad as mine, and both were worse than the earlier analog technology.

What is on your bookshelf?

Most of my engineering books are obsolete today, but I’ve noticed many of our engineers also have copies of “Numerical Recipes in C”. In the old days, I found the book “Reference Data for Radio Engineers” useful when I wanted to quickly understand a topic I had not studied before. Today I go to Wikipedia. Of course, I have a few hundred books on audio, video, and DSP on my bookshelves. I also have two storage pallets of old pre-web IC data books and manuals I need to clean out.

On the marketing side, I recommend “Product Manager’s Desk Reference”, “Spin Selling”, “Customer Visits”, “Winning at New Products”, and “Four Steps to the Epiphany”. Of course, there are also books that were sort of trendy, like “Crossing the Chasm”, “The Innovator’s Dilemma” or “The Goal”, and then there are marketing classics from Porter, Levitt, Day, etc.

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

I always advise people to start a new project by writing the data sheet or brochure for the product. If you can do that, you have defined most of the user-facing specifications for the product, explained the major use cases, and established what your competitive positioning should be.

What has been your favorite project?

I think the most enjoyable was a project I did was in the TV broadcasting business, where I was able to really analyze an industry problem in detail and work closely with a small engineering team to build a solution. We had a good time and won an Emmy award for it.

As an engineering manager, the most interesting was building a 1000-disk storage array for a supercomputer. That was an effort where our company built our own CPU, compiler, operating system, middleware, bus architectures, and storage. It shipped pretty much on time and at a competitive price, but our company’s market strategy and planning was badly flawed and we went out of business. That’s when I decided to go into marketing.

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

I’ve never had any really bad accidents, despite doing my own soldering on analog designs.

What are you currently working on?

I work for Fraunhofer, the primary inventors of mp3 and AAC audio coding. We are always working on new audio codecs to enable better perceived audio quality at lower bitrates. Our codecs are not only used in iPods and mobile phones, but are also used in broadcasting standards around the world. I just returned from the NAB broadcast show where we introduced our plug-in that brings the entire catalog of Fraunhofer codecs to audio editing software so you can listen to your mix in real-time through the codec. We also showed our AAC metadata products for TV broadcasters to use to comply with the CALM act to curtail loud commercials.

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

There are many consumer trends we track, as our business has a long planning horizon. The rise of tablet computing may lead to more entertainment content being consumed with earphones or very modest speakers. On the other hand, we may see living rooms equipped with 7.1 speakers or other audio enhancements to complement their large 3-D TVs. Content providers may also use new delivery channels – 4G to the car or over-the-top cord-cutting to the home.

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