As Rick Buskens and I ventured back from eating ice cream on N Craig St street I shared my thesis topic and the simulation challenge it presented. To explore the topic of analog fault modeling I needed to simulate 1000’s of circuits. For every operational op-amp I would be inserting shorts modeled as a 1-ohm…
Tag: CMU
36 Views of Conversations with my PhD Advisor: View 2
Moments do exist in an engineering career when you question yourself. Am I in the right place? Am I good enough? Sometimes it gets bad enough that you fall into Imposter Syndrome. Firmly, I believe everyone has these moments. If they say they don’t then they are lying and don’t seek them for advice in…
Apprenticed to Study Manufacturing Defects–A Graduate School Story
In the Fall of 1988 I started my PhD studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Soon, I began to have an inkling of why Professor Wojciech Maly had invited me to be his student. Attending the weekly research group meeting exposed me to the thesis topics of the other students….
36 Views of Conversations with my PhD Advisor: View 1–Grad School Story
My graduate school applications resulted in several PhD programs to choose from. Naturally, I visited each school. After an eight-hour drive from Poughkeepsie, NY to Pittsburgh, PA, I found myself across a desk from Wojciech Maly. The acceptance letter indicated he would be my advisor. He took time from teaching his VLSI design project class to…
Buying Batteries at Big Bird
We do not comprehend the privilege of being white. It occurs in micro-moments throughout the day and escapes us white people. Why? Because we do not experience the small slights that people who have darker skins deal with every day. I can only claim to have understood it once. The epiphany occurred at a Giant…
Finding Purpose: A Graduate School Story
Pursuing a PhD in engineering requires perseverance, and having a purpose helps when you have a rough day. I delayed graduate school because the statement of purpose portion of the application made me realize that I wasn’t sure of my purpose. So I took the risk to wait on a PhD as I began an…
What’s Your Purpose?–A Graduate School Story
Though we shared a similar reaction, Jim Quinlan and I responded differently to filing our graduate school applications. When we met during our Ph.D studies at Carnegie Mellon University, the topic arose as we started the “how did you get here” conversation. We attended different schools for our bachelors’ degrees in electrical engineering. He graduated…
Introduction to a Sexy Hard Problem: From the Weak Write Test Mode Saga
Signs the problem is very hard: Before you have worked on it you’re asked a vague question from an IBM engineer during a research review. The solution results in a 10X decrease. The solution can be applied to every single product with that circuitry at your company. Patents are filed. People who can’t make your…