Interview with Stephen Lau

Featured Engineer

Stephen Lau

Stephen Lau - Product Manager, Debug Technology

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

My father, in his youth, was very interested in electronics, and it was a hobby for him. In Hong Kong, he would build transistor radios and remote controlled boats. This interest in electronics and computers stayed with him as he moved to Canada, so he always had a sort of “mad scientists’ lab” in the basement. This was where he would build and fix electronic gadgets, computers and other electrical things. It was stocked with all sorts of components, boards, old machines, etc.

As a young boy, I would go down there and play around with all the strange shaped components, and even early computers. I remember, one of the first computer games we played was on an 6502 based computer with a tape deck for storage. The game was tank, where you basically have two players chase each other through a maze.

I decided on engineering in high school chemistry class, where I had to made my university selections. At that point, I learned that basic science was not about bringing things to practical purposes, so I decided engineering was the way to go. At that time, I applied for chemical engineering, as my hometown of Sarnia, Ontario is a big refining city. Then after the first general year in university I decided that the chemical industry was not right for me, and since I had a lot of good experiences with electronics, electrical devices and computers, I choose to specialize in electrical engineering.

At that time, you could feel the excitement in electrical and computer engineering, as the internet was just starting to take off. I started with gopher, then quickly moved to the Mosaic browser, and the whole time, we were on dialup. Nowadays, my phone can do more than my computer then!

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

The Fluke digital multi-meter is probably my favorite of all time. It does all the basics, and does them in a reliable, predictable fashion. They have always focused on usability and design which I admire and find lacking in our highly technical industry. Logic analyzers and scopes would be my second choices, as those generic tools can help you figure out many types of problems. Considering that my team builds hardware tools, I do use our own XDS series of debug test controllers (in-circuit emulators) a lot. Because of the tight levels of integration and the creation of systems on a chip, what was previously available to us through logic analyzers and scopes now is being made available through on-chip debug logic.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

Microsoft Excel is my absolute favorite software tool. Excel is very powerful not just for calculating numbers, but organizing information. By putting things into a simple Excel database, you can use the pivot tables to quickly sort through information. Or, you could use it to build truth tables to ensure you catch all problem cases exhaustively.

What is on your bookshelf?

Perhaps these days, the question should be, “Which web sites do you go to most?”! I do, still receive IEEE Spectrum and Bloomburg Businessweek as magazines that I enjoy reading the most. IEEE Spectrum was a magazine my father had, and I found it valuable then and now, to see what people in related industries are working on. I also like Invention and Technology, which is a history of technology magazine.

For books and websites, I am interested in industrial design, general interest, and business strategy books. For industrial design, Core 77 is great. They talk about all sorts of trends in design and related issues. Recently, they had a good series on design for sustainability, which I think will be an increasing area of interest for many products. For an electrical engineer, these topics may seem very macro-oriented, but I believe these trends reflect the future industry directions. For example, sustainability will drive the trend toward more efficient electrical devices.

For general interest books, Blink and Nudge are probably most recent that I have read. Honestly, I don’t read as many books now, as the information is either more quickly conveyed via websites, or becomes outdated before the book is published.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

Drawing. Best if done by hand, on paper or a whiteboard. There’s something that focuses the mind when you draw the diagram or truth table by hand either by yourself or with your team.

What has been your favorite project?

This is a hard question, each project has aspects which I enjoyed. I would probably say the IEEE 1149.7 debug and test standard would be my most favorite, as it was extremely challenging from a technical, legal, and business perspective.

The IEEE 1149.7 standard is designed to provide a compatible upgrade to the venerable IEEE 1149.1 JTAG debug and test standard. The primary goal was to provide a non-proprietary, industry standards compliant method to reduce pins needed to access debug and test capabilities. Beyond reducing the number of pins, the standard also adds capabilities focused on debug and power awareness.

The IEEE 1149.7 standard will improve industry by providing a non-proprietary, industry standards compliant way to access debug and test capabilities. Because IEEE 1149.7 is backward compatible with IEEE 1149.1, existing on-chip IP and tools can still be used with the new standard. As IEEE 1149.7 has support for star configurations, stacked packages or die can be more easily constructed.

This has also been my favorite project because it represents the next generation of a very fundamental technology in our industry. I would also choose XDS100, our line of low cost debug and test controllers. This product was initially built in a “guerrilla” operation, and has since come to revolutionize our technology and business, and enjoys extremely wide customer acceptance.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

In university, I worked one summer in a medical science facility. This was different from all my other experiences as I was responsible for finding and measuring nerve cells in the lower intestine and the effects that various chemicals had on them. Except for high school biology class, I had never worked on tissue before, which was quite different than working with computers and electronics!

What are you currently working on?

Currently, my area of interest in embedded software development automation. This is focused on both the process side and the actual development. This means automating our development process from project initiation in an ISO compliant manner through project tracking and long term support. Automation for actual development has been well established, but I am seeing a lot of new technology coming from the IT industry which has the potential to make a substantial impact on productivity in embedded software development.

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

Electronics themselves will continue on the path of integration of systems on a chip. For debug, substantial new capabilities are being created which both drive down customer cost yet dramatically increase debug visibility. An increasing area of focus is on power and system performance measurement.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

The biggest challenge in the electrical and electronics industry is the flight of talent towards business and finance careers. Culturally the contributions of engineering are not rewarded or valued which further drives away innovative individuals. This drying out of our talent pipeline is a critical barrier to long term innovation.