Let’s do lunch!

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

(Aka grab a coffee, have a chat, ah heck, let’s just meet face to face!)

Now that I have your attention…. Yeah. Let’s do lunch.  I was reading a past issue of my “Working Mothers”magazine the other day – their ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ issue –and came across a factoid that said taking a lunch break is a great way to reenergize yourself.  Step out of the office, stretch your body and mind, and recharge your spirit.

I agree.  I am not one to eat at my desk. I need to get out of the office even if it is eating out with co-workers.  The few minutes of walking out the door and into the sunshine/rain/cold/heat – whatever it may be – wakes up the mind, body and spirit.  And it is definitely a much better way to get that jolt of energy for the afternoon rather than relying solely on the lovely vice of caffeine.

So why am I talking about lunch?  Going out for lunch and the upside it brings in the way of fresh ideas and new connections with people is the exact same benefit that tradeshows and conferences give us.  So, let’s step out of the office, stretch our bodies and minds and recharge our spirits at DesignCon 2011.

How can you make the most out of DesignCon? Get out and meet people. Talk, exchange ideas, and fuel one another’s creative and technical psyche.  That’s what a business lunch or a well-organized conference can do for us.

This year at DesignCon, AWR will be a first time exhibitor but on top of the usual booth duty, I’ve set up quite a few meetings, lunches, breakfasts and dinners to make this event a worthy place to conduct business. Going to the show and spending time “just standing” at your exhibit or spending your free time “by yourself” is the same as eating lunch at your desk.

So here’s my challenge to you:

• Take advantage of the close proximity of the venue and the many colleagues gathered together.
• Challenge yourself to “do lunch” with at least one other partner, customer or friend at the show.
• Maybe even visit with the publications and hear what others in the industry are saying.

I know you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the ideas that flow. And if for some reason, you can’t locate a willing participant for lunch… come find me. I’ll be at AWR Booth #423

 

Don't Stop Talking

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

I can’t remember at which airport I was when I read this USA Today headline: “The Year We Stopped Talking.”

And without reading anything more, I knew the article had to be about social media, texting and the many wonderful wireless gadgets that have become necessary to our survival in the 21^st century. We have certainly moved away from voice as the primary means of exchanging information and replaced it with text messaging. While I accept that we have become a world of ‘thumb’ and ‘touch screen’ typists, I can’t agree that we don’t need to communicate by voice as well, whether via skype, cell, or even the old fashion way...face to face.

Yes!  Face to face. This personal interaction is important for our industry. I recently attended APMC in Japan last month and experienced first-hand the value of one-on-one direct interaction. Not only did I engage in meaningful conversation with AWR customers from Panasonic to Murata but also with other partners, colleagues and coworkers on topics such as coupled thermal/electric co-simulation of MMICs, as well as PCB layout integration through ODB++ .

I also bumped into friends at R&S and Anritsu. The first traveled from Germany and the latter from California. We all agreed that getting personal time with our coworkers was critical to ensure we are communicating clearly and working toward our corporate goals. And just as important, exchanging experiences, information and stories with respect to “emerging” technologies and trends seem much more effective in person. For example, connecting companies such as R&S, Anritsu, Mesuro and HFE with AWR in the emerging field of non-linear behavior modeling ensures we all stayed plugged into the latest and greatest developments.

Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, also agrees on this topic and reminds us that technology can be turned off. "We've come to confuse continual connectivity with making real connections," Turkle says. "We're 'always on' to everyone. When you actually look more closely, in some ways we've lost the time for the conversations that count."

To further make my point, consider these statistics: according to a semi-annual wireless survey released in October by CTIA-The Wireless Association, 93% of Americans now use a wireless device or cellphone — and not just for voice calls.  From June 2009 to June 2010, subscribers sent 1.8 trillion text messages (up 33% from the previous year) and 56.3 billion multimedia messages (up 187% from the year before).

But short of sharing insights and getting answers to questions, face to face time allows other personal connections to happen and free-form dialogue to emerge. How else would I learn some of you out there enjoy reading my blog! So thank you MWJ for asking me back as a blogger during APMC and our face to face dinner meeting.

Here’s to more face time within the RF & Microwave community in 2011 and not less.

 

Social media for engineers: good or garbage?

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

Two weeks ago, I attended an EDAC panel session on Social Media for emerging companies to learn from the big guys.  On the panel were representatives from Altera, Cadence, Synopsys and EE Times, and out of all of them, I most enjoyed the EE Times speaker since he presented actual data (see Figure 1) in true engineering fashion. The insightful take-away… Engineers hate Twitter!

Well, I am not sure my opinion can persuade you to ignore these numbers, but as far as social media goes, I hope you agree that just like the internet, social media isn’t a passing fad. Naturally, it will evolve and change over time, but it isn’t going away. And with that, I’m proud to personally and professionally embrace social media and take a leading position using these various channels to reach fellow engineers. 

Figure 2, complements of Altera, shows the many channels available to firms wanting to embrace social media. For a high-tech industry that’s innovative in design and development, we sure tend to shy away from the cutting edge in social media. I’m not exactly sure why. Engineers are precise and cautious while social media is perhaps too loose, fast and fickle?  

You tell me.  In addition to the usual Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and my shameless plug for blogging;-), etc. offerings that most firms have explored, AWR is also one to venture into a few other less frequently explored domains…

Witness the iPhone. “There must be an app for that.” Voila. The Transmission Line (TX-Line) Calculator. Thanks to AWR’s intern, Alex Collins, for tackling this first offering for us. Why don’t you take a look; download and use the app; and give us feedback on ways to improve it or suggest other apps to tackle? Get ithere .
  
Or how about a Microwave Calculator? Agilent offers us a Microwave (µWave) calculator to find errors in measurements. Find that app here .
 
Software as a service or a so-called “online design center”?  Transim Technology, recently acquired by Arrow, is providing viable portals to designers for the evaluation of products/parts in the context of typical applications long before they have to actually speak to another human being by phone or through an email exchange.  More than simply an “interactive data sheet,” the site allows users to place a device from a sponsoring manufacturer into a specific circuit using the manufacturer’s device parameters (or varying them) and run a simulation.  Sound enticing?  Give it a try.  Here  you can “play” in a controlled way with designs in the RF/microwave space such as WCDMA amplifiers.   

What will be next in social media for the engineering mindset? I don’t know, but like your typical engineer looking for next generation’s technology, I’m excited to see what it could be. And isn’t curiosity just one of the many traits that we engineers have in common?  Well, aside from our dislike of Twitter. LOL.

 

Recession buster!

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

I just got back from European Microwave Week (EuMW) in Paris and have to share my enthusiasm. The last show of this kind I attended was two years ago in Amsterdam. Now, perhaps the location (oui, c’est magnifique!) influenced the turn-out, but the atmosphere at each of these events could not have been more different. Amsterdam was a respectable show, but Paris broke records. 

The EuMW exhibition in Paris was huge, with more than 250 exhibitors.  Impressive, even expansive booth configurations from Rohde & Schwarz, Agilent, AWR and Anritsu, covered the show floor, and what was even better is that you had a hard time to get a full view of each as the engineers, designers, industry professionals, etc. packed the aisles (record attendance reported at 4,621). The first two days of the show were hectic – full of hustle and bustle - and even the last day was busy. 

Outside of the show floor activity, there were many, great technical sessions being offered, too. Surprisingly, I managed to convince a busy co-worker to attend one with me, Nonlinear Vector Network Analyzer User's Forum http://www.eumweek.com/2010/specialsessions.asp?id=c.  This 90-minute session was invigorating, as it was alive with real exchanges of thought-provoking content and ideas.  The informal discussion group of competitors not only openly shared information on instrumentation used in vector large-signal network analysis of microwave circuits and systems, containing nonlinear element but agreed to seek, to some extent, a standard for sharing this nonlinear data.  The final call to action was a request for new/additional committee chairs to lead this effort, so I’m making this plea to all gurus in the field of NVNA measurements: reach out to organizers Jean-Pierre Teyssier and Dominique Schreurs if you are interested. 

Not to be overlooked, there were also a handful of vendor sponsored presentations and workshops (similar in concept to the MicroApps at IMS) hosted during the week throughout the venue as well.  

Synergistic with the NVNA user forum, Rohde & Schwarz, AWR and NMDG presented a tutorial:  “Fast Nonlinear Device Characterization and PA Designs Using VNAs. ”  The standing-room-only crowd stayed for 90-minutes plus to learn more about this emerging field of “nonlinear behavior models.”    The handful I managed to find time to sit through were all well attended and with interactive Q&A too.  

Even in the evening hours, sessions were still taking place.  On Monday evening,  I attended TriQuint’s New TQP15 Process rollout presentation while also enjoying a glass of wine.  
 
Along with the commercial world activities, EuMW organized a student design competition, running live during the conference week. AWR added to the excitement by awarding software to the organizers, University of Lille, of this fun and practical event!

With all this activity and opportunities to learn and interact with others in the industry, there was no time for a break…  To which I say, recession?   What recession?  If this show is a barometer for our RF & microwave industry and economy, then EuMW was a recession buster for sure, and I look forward to the year ahead!

GaAs is Green & Energy Efficient

 Dr. Mike Heimlich, Microwave & RF Marketing, AWR

Complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology is truly amazing. The degree to which technological progress and international commerce have benefited from IC miniaturization cannot be underestimated, and device integration has led to astounding new capabilities that technologists of fifty years ago could never have dreamed of.

Today, nearly every aspect of analog and mixed-signal design has been realized in silicon at frequencies or applications that no one would have thought possible just a few years back. But will the futures' yet-to-be-defined applications result in the end of the line for compound semiconductors once and for all?

GaAs microwave monolithic integrated circuits (MMICs) exploded on to the scene in the mid- to late- 1980s. Many of the processing challenges in making bulk, crystalline silicon had been solved. The semi-insulating properties of GaAs, so valuable to microwave applications, could be reliably and somewhat repeatedly manufactured for three- and/or four-inch wafers. MMICs had come of age. Fast forward to the new millennium… Despite the benefits of integration and low-cost, high-volume production, silicon has not taken over. So what happened? What are the lessons of the recent past that provide a basis for prognosticating the compound semiconductor future in light of silicon’s never-ending progress? Two words: batteries and modules.

For portable devices, battery life is paramount and modules inexpensively combine multiple technologies leading to more of it. The first generation or two of cell phones taught the industry many things, not the least of which was that people want more “talk-time.” Compound semiconductors fit the bill better than silicon when it comes to energy efficiency. This is not so much a billboard for being “green” as it is a reason for forestalling the recharging of energy-hungry handsets. While the higher threshold voltages of many compound semiconductor technologies would seem to be a detractor to efficiency, since power is about both voltage and current, when operation gets down below 5V then AlGaAs and InP really come through.  The balance between voltage and current when determining power and efficiency is a complex interplay of effective device operation, voltage breakdown, and current loss. Efficiencies of compound semiconductor-based designs come much closer to their topologically ideal values than their silicon counterparts mostly because of the physics behind the operation of the active devices.

The next frontiers in wireless are a bit hazy. Now that W- and V-band CMOS is available, what role will GaAs play? The technology winners and losers won’t be determined by single-chip integration capability. To be sure, solutions will need to be well-integrated and small. However, if the wireless growth of the last decade is an indicator, solutions will most definitely need to be energy efficienct. 

CMOS designers have published results of integrated radios at 60GHz and discrete solutions above that so it looks like silicon is poised to continue its dominance. However compound semiconductors (GaAs) will also see use in new applications and higher frequencies. Wherever battery life reigns supreme, circuits will need to be implemented in technologies yielding the highest power-added efficiency (PAE), the greatest linearity, and the lowest noise figure. The players, in terms of the chemistry and devices, may change, but there is every reason to expect that FET and bipolar devices will be found in handset modules using InP, AlGaAs, or related substrates. If these technologies are to be successful, geometries will need to be reduced. But more importantly, the module technologies will need to ride the technology curve to higher performance as well, boding well for GaAs –as its green and energy efficient! 

Stop Waiting and Start Surfing

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

I met a friend of a friend of a friend in early July at my friend's husband’s garage band debut. Long story short, my new friend is a surfer and offered to teach me when I said that one of the things on my bucket list is to try to surf.

Well, that threw me into "what to do mode."  Do I learn to surf? I mean, the water is so cold in LA, the waves are rough, my reflexes slow, I'll look like a complete fool. I'm almost positive I won't even be able to stand up on the board without getting clobbered. My list of excuses and self-doubt went on and on. 

But then I stopped myself and said, ok....enough with the negatives. Look at the positives of trying to learn to surf. It is something new, different, very LA. Exercise, social, looks peaceful in a crazy sort of way. Why not embrace life and be willing to stretch myself out of my usual comfort zone? Nothing ventured, nothing gained comes to mind!

And then it hit me. This activity is risky. And the reward is completely unknown. That's the real dilemma...fear of the unknown. Wow. Am I admitting this to all of you? Fear stops us from doing a lot of things. Sometimes for the better…sometimes not.

Well, for those of you who know me, I'm not usually known for being one to pass up a chance to live life outside my comfort zone so—yes, you guessed it—I am going to go for it!  Now the question for you my reader is this.... would you stop waiting and start surfing?  (to be continued)…

The New Company Culture—Play vs. Pay

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

Well, another IMS has come and gone, and once again we survived the chaos of getting ready and then pulled off a fantastic show. While wandering the show floor and perusing other exhibitors’ booths, I couldn't help but notice a clear divide between booth personnel who looked happy and excited and those who looked a bit disconnected, and yes, even bored. Then after I returned to the office I coincidentally viewed two interesting videos, one on YouTube and one on 60 Minutes –thank you Mom & Dad for making me watch this over the years- that gave me one possible answer.

The first clip on YouTube was from Innovation Daily: RSA Animate — Drive: Dan Pink and the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.  A very clever animated cartoon presentation that was indeed surprising, it discussed irrefutable evidence that workers are motivated not, as you would think, by more money or pay, but instead by the sheer pleasure of creating or working on something meaningful that receives positive feedback. The typical motivation scheme within organizations is to reward performance with a monetary incentive. Tests have found that once cognitive skill/ conceptual creative thinking comes into play, a larger reward led to poorer performance!  Studies have found that if you pay people enough so that money is not an issue, three factors lead to better performance and personal satisfaction: autonomy or desire to be self-directed, mastery—the urge to get better at stuff, and sense of purpose.

So why are there people in the world who have jobs and get paid, but do the same thing during their limited discretionary time for free? Examples: Linux, Apache, Wikipedia. More and more corporations are operating with a transcendent purpose, and that makes coming to work better for employees, and also attracts more talented workers. Conversely, when profit motive separates from incentive motive, bad things happen. Not only bad ethics, but bad products and services, uninspiring place to work, people don’t do great things. Companies that are flourishing today are animated by a sense of purpose.

Interesting. Hmm. Could that be why some folks at IMS were busy, excited, smiling and engaged with others while some were disengaged, mopey even, and unhappy looking?  Is it the difference between a job/paycheck and a job/passion?

Then, a couple days later, I watched 60 Minutes, which did a segment on the online shoe company, Zappos. (Believe it or not, I have yet to purchase shoes on this site…for those who know me, I like shoes :-) so this doesn’t compute.)  I digress.  Anyway, the theme of the segment was that Zappos is an unusual company with an unusual business model—they are constantly trying to find ways to improve on employee happiness, fully believing that employee happiness leads to customer happiness and investor/shareholder happiness.

Tony Hsieh, Zappos' CEO, has even written a book: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. Zappos believes that focusing on company culture will enable them to provide great service, which will lead to financial success down the road. Clearly, Zappos has bought into, and successfully implemented, the same concepts outlined in Dan Pink’s presentation: a company culture focused on employee happiness results in a company that has passion and purpose, and that will ultimately lead to profits.

Both of these video segments, coupled with my own exhausting but highly enjoyable experience at IMS, led me to conclude there is indeed a lot to be said for job happiness.  And once again for those who know me or have read my blogs in the past, I’ve found a company and job that delivers happiness to me and hopefully I deliver some of it back!  Now, let me log in to www.zappos.com to celebrate!

Seeds of Change

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

AWR’s current ad, “Ideas Grow Faster in the Right Environment” graces the front of our 2010 AWR Magazine (6mb PDF) this month. There are many interpretations stemming from this visual (pun intended) that can be explored. But for now and for the purpose of this blog, the sprout portrays AWR’s corporate culture: innovation, spawning new ideas, the right environment for creativity, growth into new markets, seeds of change…

Rather than recreate that cover story here, I invite you to download the magazine online and read it for yourself. Instead, in this blog I’m going to sprout out in another direction.  .. academia and university outreach. 

AWR recently gave root to a new growth opportunity for our software in the academic community. At the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) Annual Conference in Florida this past March, I announced in my ECEDHA Perspectives interview AWR’s Graduate Gift Initiative, which provides qualified* 2010 graduates a free, fully-functional, one-year term license of  Microwave Office and Visual System Simulator (VSS) software suites - inclusive of AXIEM 3D planar EM software. The goal of the initiative is to give graduating electrical engineering students a career head start by providing hands-on exposure to AWR's high-frequency design software.

This initiative is a follow on to our Preferred University Program, which works with universities worldwide to provide students with access to RF/microwave software tools. These programs have been launched  in direct response to industry and academia expressing the need for students to have hands-on experience with these tools prior to graduating and entering the job market.

And, most recently, AWR has announced the donation of free licenses of our software as the prize award to the winners of the IMS/MTT 2010 Power Amplifier Student Design Contest.

What better way to sow seeds of change and spawn the growth of new ideas, new engineers, new technologies, etc. than to enrich the academic environment by providing the software engineering students need to learn and grow from the classroom and into their first job? Our students of today are the future of the industry—we need to empower them with the best and latest tools so they are prepared to flourish.

How to Be a Good Blogger

 Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>

Blogging: My first experience at blogging came with an invitation from editor David Vye to contribute a guest blog on the Microwave Journal website. It was like a jump into the deep end of the pool!

I had never blogged prior and certainly not imagined such a prominent place on the MWJ site, but knowing David for many years, if he was willing to ask me to try it, I was willing to give it a go.

Now that I am a self-anointed expert blogger after six months of contributions to Microwave Journaland a recently-launched blog on our own AWR website, I thought I would share some insights I’ve gained from my experience.

First, I think you must possess at least three traits in order to be a good blogger:

1) You need to be outspoken (geesh, I guess I am not afraid to have an opinion or share my thoughts/views/perspectives on things).

2) You need to be entertaining (a VC friend told me he likes that I do not take myself too seriously on these things—that has never been me and so my own personality worked well here—I am a bit goofy on occasion or so I am told ).

3) Be relevant. This was the hardest one. Week in and week out how do you try to convey something that will be relevant and interesting to hopefully more than a handful of readers? Pulling from friends, colleagues and life experiences was key. I like to have a lot going on in my life and this has helped me to find inspiration on more than one occasion.

In the end, I started to blog about technology life, or rather, living in the career world of technology, if I have to give it a catch all. I was surprised by the response. The first month on the MWJ site, my blog was the most read. The trend continued as I continued blogging. People would comment, e-mail me, stop by at an event to say hello. What a great feeling! To find out that you have connected with people in the same career field as yourself and that you are able to meet new people and make new connections as a result. I was also amazed to realize that I was not only presenting myself in a multi-dimensional way, but that I was conveying a personality for AWR, too.

Blogging has turned out to be both fun and functional. So much so that I have taken the blog to AWR and have gotten others to join in and blog along side me. For those of you like me who have uncovered that work life is not a separate life of its own, but rather a life that blends, merges with our own personal lives, social lives, etc., blogging was one of the first ways (and albeit interesting too) to convey this complexity and connectivity.

All of you out there who are nodding their heads as they read this, start blogging…you’ll find it rewarding on many levels!

 

First-Pass Success for 10 GPBS Backplanes

 Dr. Mike Heimlich, Microwave & RF Marketing, AWR

I was recently talking to a teacher friend of mine--internationally recognized in her field. Her stature is a source of some sort of pride on my part since I’ll never have a beer with a Nobel laureate, so this is the closest I’ll come. The conversation meandered (no pun intended as you’ll see in a minute) to what was currently interesting with my job and than to what was interesting with hers. We noticed that both of us were involved in teaching and technology despite the fact that we didn’t have the same jobs or work in the same fields. The part I remember most about the conversation is two things she said about how people learn—you can’t teach someone anything (they must want to learn it) and people learn the most when they make mistakes. In other words, we teach ourselves the most when we learn from mistakes. I was blown away. With all due respect to everyone from my Ph.D. advisor down to Mrs. Cohen, my Kindergarten teacher (wherever she may be), I want my money back!  But after thinking about it for a while, I could see the logic and how it maps into what we do as circuit designers. If you were with me right out of college when I was designing MMICs, you would know that a “Heimlich Maneuver” is not related to the first-aid procedure for saving a choking victim per se—it’s when, in the days before LVS, a young engineer accidentally tied Vdd to ground through an airbridge. I learned a lot that day. I have never made that mistake again in 20+ years, and I found out how to pop an airbridge to get an IC working for free in 5 minutes instead of for $50K and waiting 3 months.

I recently had the chance to design an SI demo board with an AWR colleague and a couple of engineers from Anritsu. The idea was to try and drive 10Gbps across at least 12” of FR4 to compare what AWR’s design software would predict to what could be measured by the Anritsu VectorStar VNA. We used Microwave Office® software to get a good 50-ohm differential microstrip line channel and then laid down two coupled lines to take advantage of the VectoStar’s four-port option. AXIEM™ screamed through some transitions for SMA to microstrip on the top and then for some microstrip-to-stripline via transitions for a few channels in stripline. We finished the whole thing up by comparing the circuit models to AXIEM simulations (sims for short) across the whole length of each channel by taking advantage of 64-bit AXIEM on an 8-processor PC. Everything looked beautiful....and then I remembered my teacher friend’s advice… “we learn from our mistakes!” So to “learn” something, I broke a couple of things. On the microstrip layer, I added a channel with an improper fill—too close to the microstrip—that we could further “break” by dropping in some SMT shunt caps since the solder mask was left off. On the stripline, we meandered the line to add some skew by jogging the line to one side only.  I thought to myself, “ahhh, yes, this will be a great experience for those attending the demo—the board will be ‘broken’ and they can learn something by suggesting how to fix it!” The designs were shipped off to the PCB layout engineer with instructions to add the usual fill and ground vias to the top to properly ground the microstrip. And that’s where the joke was on me, as you’ll see in a minute. The board came back and the Anritsu engineers started testing it. They couldn’t understand. Based on the AWR sims, why would the board only support a couple of Gbps instead of up to 10 Gbps? Finally one of them looked at the transitions and saw that there were no ground vias! My instructions to the layout engineer had been specific about the microstrip lines...but not the transitions!! I learned a lot from that mistake, let me tell you! But thanks to my now good friends at Anritsu, some vias were drilled and filled and we got the board to work despite me wanting to make sure that the board was broken. So, if you want to teach yourself something new by fixing some of my “mistakes,” stop by and see the demo board at IMS in the Anritsu booth or view the demo from DesignCon 2010 over on AWR.TV!