Featured Engineer

Interview with Steve Weir

Steve Weir

Steve Weir - CTO IPBLOX, LLC

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

Agilent VNA

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

Simbeor 3D full wave solver

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

A redundant PLL that had a vulnerability in a very small window at 180 degrees.

What is on your bookshelf?

Bogatin, Hall, Young, Johnson, Wadell, Paul, Novak, Swaminathan

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

Shorted perimeter method for PDN analysis. Shorted perimeter is an analysis technique. Shorted perimeter makes fairly fast work of PDN analysis and design by establishing an imaginary perimeter around each IC where the bypass capacitors for that IC can be most closely located to that IC. The power and ground cavity is then shorted along the length of that perimeter. A distributed Z11 measurement is then obtained as seen by the IC attachments to the power/ground cavity. The result is the absolute lowest impedance response that can be realized for the proposed stack-up. If that response is marginal or inadequate, then the stack-up must be changed. If it is not marginal, then the number of bypass capacitors needed for the particular IC is accurately estimated with simple algebra, no $50,000. tool or trial by error needed.

What has been your favorite project?

Joint project w/ Samtec on a power delivery interposer

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

Early in my career I got a hands-on lesson on magnetic saturation and the importance of analyzing boundary conditions. As many lessons go, that one was learned when all the smoke came out of the switching transistors in an SMPS.

What are you currently working on?

I am currently developing property in both power delivery and alternative energy fields. I am working on methods to improve power delivery cost and performance in both IC and PCB packages. I am also increasingly active in product developments with customers in alternative energy: mostly solar. Alternative energy is one of the massive growth industries which presents many opportunities across many engineering disciplines.

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

We are seeing a shift more and more into packaging and materials as major limiting factors in system performance and cost.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

Serial standards at 6gbps and beyond are taxing the medium and small size OEMs who previously could get away largely with cookbook solutions. Given the amount of industry revenue that these players represent, this is a serious challenge both for design and verification.

The US seems to be falling behind Asia Pacific in packaging

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