More thoughts on creative destruction, articles on trend spotting, the IMS and youth - Is this deja vu, all over again ??

June 17, 2009

Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Sherry a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

Creative destruction.  On a flight two weeks ago on American Airlines, I read an article in their May 15th issue of American Way called "Trend Spotter"  In it, Marian Salzman listed her Ten trends that are changing everything from consumerism to the business landscape throughout the modern world. 

Number 8 is the trend that got me smiling! 

8. Not without technology: Whatever else may disappear in the “creative destruction” of the crisis, technology is here to stay. Some may yearn for simpler times and the satisfaction of hand tools, but the plain truth is that the future lies in mastering new technologies.

That was cool. And then as I was walking around IMS this past week, I bumped into a few of you who recognized me from my blog and we discussed creative destruction.  Fun!  I like this interest and idea exchange.  So then I began to wonder what news was being presented at IMS that could be considered “creative destruction”.  I'd like to hear from you on what you saw or are seeing that could fall into this thought thread. 

For now, I'm going to head in a slightly different direction and look back to President Kennedy's challenge in the 1960s to put a man on the moon within 10 years.  Everyone thought it would be impossible, but only 8 years later, Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot onto the moon.  While this is a magnificent moment in and of itself, what I found more shocking was that the average age of the NASA employees in Houston/mission control was 26.  That means when the challenge was issued, many of those in the room were 18 years old.  The power of youth, the "I can do anything" mentality is what I find awe -inspiring. 

On the show floor, I heard Cobham comment about how we need more young people coming into the RF & microwave field.  Certainly walking the aisles you get a sense of the aging of our business.  Maybe the students didn't have the funds to travel during this recession, but it should cause us to pause and reflect.  Likewise, I met with Zoya Popovic of UC Boulder who also commented about trying to attract more young persons into microwaves & RF.  To re-introduce the “cool factor” in engineering, Zoya is creatively reconstructing her MMIC design course to move away from pure theoretical design. Her newest course incorporates not only actual virtual design (which features the AWR software environment), but also teams up with TriQuint Semiconductor to have the students’ designs fabricated.  In her first trial of the course last fall, she had eight students take part.  When the chips came back, the semester was over but the majority of students found the time to come back to the lab to test/measure their devices so that they could close the loop by comparing the simulated to measured results. In a way, the students took the initiative to self-evaluate their own designs and abilities. This is the enthusiasm of youth that put us on the moon in 8 years.

Zoya is now wrapping up her second offering of the course with 23 students and going to repeat it in the fall with more than 50 persons already pre-registered.  Wow, this trend is great!  Certainly, making engineering more tangible with hands-on design is always a great thing for attracting talent and students.  Providing them with tools for design other than paper and pencil, outfit the students quite readily for employment in the real-world.  Zoya is not alone with her efforts to reconstruct course work to entice more students over into the one industry that no doubt will be leading the creative destruction era of the years ahead.

To once again quote Marian, "the plain truth is that the future lies in mastering new technologies," and to me the future is only going to become more high-tech and wireless.  This is where the bright minds of our younger generation will focus whether we call them microwave engineers or wireless engineers or even creative destruction engineers.  I feel inspired that the younger generation - just like the 1960s revealed to us - will be what shapes our future high-tech world.  For those of you like me and raising kids, I find this quite exciting!

 

The Rest of the Story

June 3, 2009

 


Mike Heimlich is currently product marketing director for AWR's Microwave Office® and Signal Integrity Design Suite™ product lines and responsible for university programs. Prior to joining AWR, he was an engineer with Watkins-Johnson, Pacific Monolithics, and M/A-COM. In 1996 he co-founded Smartlynx, whose interoperability technology forms the basis for AWR's PCB flow integrations. Mike authors numerous technical articles on high-frequency designs, multi-domain signal integrity analysis, and design tool interoperability. His current research interests include design flow analysis and modeling. Mike holds a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Mike a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

Reading Sherry Hess’s blog got me to thinking about Paul Harvey and “the rest of the story.”  For those of you who haven’t lived in the U.S. Heartland or don’t listen to AM radio much anymore, Harvey made a career out of the kind of human interest stories, historical vignettes, or short biographies that are out of fashion today by feeding you an anonymous, out of context story-line only to reveal “the rest of the story” later in the program to make a point, teach you some history, or touch your heart.  Sherry’s discussion of productivity makes me think of the rest of the story:  the technical side and where some people are on the design “productivity curve”.

There are two halves to measuring productivity or cycle time.  First, how long does it take you to get one prototype into manufacturing.  Second, how many prototypes, or iterations, does it take to get your design into production manufacturing.   You can imagine that to some extent one can be traded off with the other, but given the way that a team designs, the design tools they may use, and a whole host of other factors, the idea of improving design productivity can become an engineering discipline unto itself.
Engineers using new technology have longer cycle times as they debug the technology with more prototypes.  Conversely, in mature technologies, you would expect that everyone optimizes their design process, taking advantage of all the EDA out there, to have minimum design cycle times and iterations.  But not everyone takes advantage of what’s out there and all designers don’t design using the same process.  For guys getting less than two spins per design on average, there just isn’t a lot of room to  eek out even more productivity.

For some folks, there’s still a whole lot of EDA to take advantage of to “ride” the productivity curve
Case in point, back before LVS and DRC (everyone out there is using them now, right?) you could pretty much count on getting nipped by these, even with a squad of diligent designers, a scaled ruler, and a light table.  Implementing DRC alone might save you a couple of spins and make a huge impact on your productivity. After getting DRC done, LVS is a little more challenging and costs slightly more but maybe now you are down around 3 spins per design and getting a full spin out of your productivity is a one-third reduction. 

So where are you on the design productivity curve and, to Sherry’s point, is the economic downturn a time to regroup and improve or scale back and let others take the lead?  What are you doing in terms of new tools or even just better utilizing the EDA, measurement, and modeling resources you already own?  Is it just a matter of taking a finer or holistic view of your flow, or starting from scratch?

I worked with one MMIC design house that is known for its leading-edge design abilities where they actually approached us and said, “this is where we see EDA needing to be in 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years.”   Oddly enough, they had been using DRC and LVS for more than a decade, but they had targeted this as a critical step in their flow that they felt was costing them.  Before I got to hear “the rest of the story”, I thought to myself, “how is that possible given that they have been using DRC/LVS tools longer than most?”  The answer is that they took a step back and didn’t just look at DRC and LVS, but they looked at how DRC/LVS evolved from and integrated with the rest of the flow.  They saw that their DRC layout and LVS schematic where not originating from the same design tools—they actually re-entered the LVS schematic by hand and apart from the DC/RF simulatable schematic,the layout was a flattened design in a layout system separate from their RF design tools.  The solution we came up with for them was to shift their layout designers to doing the layout in the same tool as the RF guys and adding some features which allow the same AWR schematic to be used for circuit simulation, system verification, and LVS.  The result – cutting their verification time by more than 50%.  While I’m not giving details of exactly who this customer is, you can validate my claims by reading one of the many AWR customer success story up on the website (link here).

Second point.  One thing I have been guilty of, and a host of my EDA brethren as well, is remembering that everything that is designed and fabbed needs to be measured.  For sure, you need to measure it make sure that performance can be understood and compared to simulation.  After all, the proof is in the pudding.  But if you look at the design flow—the critical path of getting from design concept to volume manufacturing—how, when, and why is measurement being done.  I had one design manager tell me that it was critical that engineers got on the bench; no argument here! Sole reliance on EDA software in RF/microwave design is a fool’s game, in my experience.  But then he followed it up with the “rest of the story”.  He wants his engineers to do almost no design and get out to the bench and start measuring since they found years ago that the sooner engineers were measuring circuits, the sooner the design got out the door.  If that sounds to you like throwing the baby out with the bath water, you’re in good company.  Unlike my friends revisiting DRC/LVS, this manager has not looked at how good and timely design makes for a more efficient and effective time in measurement. 

Conversely, I’ve had other managers with similar experience tell me they are down to 1.7 or so spins per design and the limiting factor is measurement as part of the design process…..sounds to me like an opportunity to start another “rest of the story”…..

So  where are you in terms of your productivity “story”?  Blog back to me about your vision and efforts to write “the rest of the story!”