Last fall I arranged a stop in Tucson, Arizona to visit my brother and his family. My nephew/godson Sean would be appearing in his high school’s production of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s “You Can’t Take It With You.” While his was a small part (one of the G-men,) it created a lovely excuse…
I Need Her Feedback
Pete Magnani managed the technical training classes at IBM’s mid-Hudson Valley sites. He had created the test training class due to lack of teaching on this topic at college. The class lasted ten to twelve weeks, with each class session held for two hours. Each week we had a different IBM employee lecture about equipment,…
Logistics and Love with My Family’s Vacation
One year I copied Nancy, chief of physical plant at my home, on an email response to my siblings regarding that year’s family vacation. The intention—let her know of upcoming travel. Inadvertently, she remained on the ensuing exchange which covered grocery lists, arrival times and potential activities. When we spoke next she remarked, “Wow, you…
Pathfinding Work on No-Touch Leakage Testing, Part 3: Tales from the Intel I/O Test Road Map
On Willamette we proved that AC I/O loopback testing worked. The AC I/O loopback provided the designers margin. I had completed the groundwork for testing I/O leakage on the structural tester using the RC decay leakage method (link to previous post.) Alas, we didn’t get a chance to try it out on the structural tester….
Best Baseball Book—Revisiting Books
Baseball remains the only professional sport I know well enough to follow a game. Via countless games of Pepper, I learned to swing and connect bat to ball. We followed the NY Mets, as two of my father’s aunts worked in the team’s office. My father’s love of the game piqued my interest, which I…
Pathfinding Work on No-Touch Leakage Testing, Part 2: Tales from the Intel I/O Test Road Map
With AC I/O Loopback test method Intel, had embarked upon not relying upon Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) to explicitly test for Input/Output (I/O) circuit characteristics. The device under test (DUT) remained connected to ATE and tests like I/O voltage levels and I/O pin leakage were still tested by the ATE. As noted in an earlier post,…
Open House at The Enchanted Cottage
A celebration of my home occurs in June. This annual open house has taken place on almost every first Saturday in June. My first home–I bought it and moved in April in 1996. By holding the housewarming in early June I gave myself a deadline to be ready for guests. The party, held inside and…
Pathfinding Work On No-Touch Leakage Testing, Part 1 of 3: Tales from the Intel I/O Test Road Map
Pathfinding at a technology company can be considered a form of research—research on an explicit engineering problem. Often it can be a long way off before the problem really needs to be solved. Sometimes it’s quite by accident that a solution developed for one problem solves a similar problem further down the roadmap. In this…
Learning that Diction Matters
How does an engineer become good with words? One word at a time. Long before I knew the word diction, I understood the impact words have on everyday conversation. A simple change of a word could clarify a request or a direction. Adding a few adjectives made the meaning more precise. An adverb communicated the…
Predicting Fails for I/O Timings: Tales from the Intel I/O Test Road Map
While Spass and Mike measured actual I/O timing failures, I simulated possible defect causes and their impact on timing performance. I used techniques I honed in graduate school on deformations to circuit misbehavior. Process variation could hypothetically contribute to circuit timing fails, though analog circuit designers mitigated the impact of such variation to circuit performance….