Below is a list of things I have done in my professional life that I am pretty proud of.
I was on the honor roll at Delta Junior College in Stockton, CA. I was at or near the top of my class in Electronics Technology with Mr. Dillon, and many of the students in my class copied my work so they could pass the course.
When I applied to the US Navy I took the ASVAB test and (was told) that my score was 67, which put my IQ at 134. For this reason the recruiter would not let me sign up as just a plain sailor, he told me "you're gonna be a Nuke (technician) or an Electronics Technician". I took the ET path and for a 6 year enlistment I got a year of electronics school (8 hours a day, not 4 hours 3 days a week like college) and an automatic rate increase to E4 (Petty Officer 3rd Class).
In ET school I quickly rose to the top of my class. Because of this I was offered Night Study Instructor instead of having to perform "watches" with my duty section. This got me out of doing nighttime barracks watches and occasional weekend barracks cleanups. Instead, every day after 8 hours of school and a break for chow (dinner) I spent two hours helping poorly performing ET students to improve their grades. In ET school if you were doing poorly you were assigned extra work and sent to Night Study. As a Night Study instructor it was my job to help people get off night study, which happened pretty regularly.
After ET school I went to Mare Island California to attend CTMS (crypto school, I could tell you more but I'd have to kill you). I was first in my class here, the box seemed so simple to me.
At Harold E. Holt Communications Station in Western Australia I saved the day when an antenna patch panel burst into flames. The HF Transmitter Site ETs were in the middle of a meeting when a radio operator flew into the ET shack and asked me to come with him. I wasn't on duty, but I came along anyway. He started running, so I followed and found an eight foot by ten foot antenna patch panel fully engulfed in flame. I grabbed a fire extinguisher, yelled to everyone to shut down all the transmitters on that wall and put the fire out. We had to rebuild the panel twice with spare parts flown in. We worked non-stop for four days before those transmitters could go back online. I was awarded a commendation by the station fire chief.
Also at Harold E. Holt, I had to give a training class. Every Second Class Petty Officer and above had to give one training class, and I was assigned the dry topic of NBC Warfare Preparedness. I studied the materials and turned it into a kind of standup comedy routine, which appeared to be very effective. My CO wrote my detailer (the guy who assigns you to your next post) and told him I should be an instructor. When my time in Australia was up, I was sent to Mare Island, CA as an instructor.
Before you can be an instructor, the Navy requires you to attend Instructor Training School. This one month class, taught by university professors in San Diego was the toughest training course I had taken. All my electronics training couldn't come fast enough, but here was the first class I thought I might actually fail. My instructors helped me through it and in the end it is this class that I valued above all my electronics training courses.
Then I arrived at Mare Island, California. However, I had never actually looked at my orders relying on what my detailer had said he would do for me, so when I showed up at CTMS (the school where I was honor student) they were very confused. I was actually supposed to go to the computer school up the hill, but when the chiefs at CTMS saw my scores as a student there four years prior, they decided they had to have me. Much to a CTMS coworkers dismay they transferred him to the computer school to fill my slot and I got to sit around for a month for my security clearance to go through so I could start teaching. Poor guy, I felt bad for him, and he was mad at me for this detour of his career, but what can I say, I was the best man for the job.
At Mare Island I worked by butt off and was able to get my classes scores higher than any previous instructors. What does that mean? The class had remained unchanged since the early 70s, and yet 10 years later my students scores were higher than any other since then. One reason was that I instituted a new program to have the students do the Preventative Maintenance on the school's equipment so as to give them real hands on training. By the way, a student's scores were based on both tests and practical troubleshooting. An instructor can help students pass the tests by giving away the answers, but he can't help them when they have to find the faulty module in a timed troubleshooting test. For this I accomplishment I was awarded the the title of Master Training Specialist by the Chief of Naval Technical Training.
After the Navy I worked for a little private technical school called Technical Training Center. At TTC I picked up the 6 month course, staying a few weeks ahead of the class and took my first class all the way through the course, which had never been done before. That's without a sit-through by the way. Jim Harris, the owner had an interesting way of teaching electronics, this video I created will give you a good idea of how we approached Op Amps. Jim is a brilliant guy, we even had complete neophytes programming microprocessors in week one!
My students were very pleased with my instruction class after class. Because of this Jim gave me the role of Dean of Instruction, just one year after I started there. Not bad for a guy without a degree to be named the Dean of a school.
At GenRad back in the mid '80s I took on the GR16 maintenance class as an instructor. At the time, the class was taught by going page by page through the schematics. It was 3 weeks of hell for the customers in this class. I cut most of that out, and concentrated on hands on troubleshooting and calibration procedures. I then picked up the GR16 Programming class and worked the students pretty hard there too. One class I taught at McClellen Air Force Base told me they had never worked so hard, either at work or in college. I developed the Algorithmic Pattern Generator (APG) training course, which no one else on the staff would touch (too complex!). I was routinely told that my class was the best anywhere. Two guys in my class told me that I was the best instructor they had ever had in their combined 8 years of college.
Also at GenRad I found that I needed to find other things to do to keep busy. I was intrigued by programming the RSX-11s "Interactive Command Line Interpreter" or CLI which was also known as command files, similar to Batch files in DOS. This was my first high level language (at TTC I learned to write programs directly into Machine code for the 6800 and Z80 uPs) . I wrote quite a few things, a full blown feature packed tape backup utility that interactively walked the user through the complex process of making a tape backup and completely handled any eventuality (write ring not installed, tape not rewound, etc). I invented an automated maintenance scheduler and tracker named PMMaster. PMMaster would create a subsystem inventory and maintenance schedule the first time it was run based on the system config file and a few answers from the operator. Then anytime the maintenance guy logged in it would check the schedule and inform the user of any outstanding maintenance that was due and give him the opportunity to check them off interactively when they were done. I also wrote programs that allowed the computer to learn in an interactive game. I eventually wrote a Slot Machine game using Pascal's very flexible data typing. I realized that a slot machine is just an array of 3 "wheels" with various symbols and used arbitrary data elements of cherry (%), orange(O), star (*) etc. I researched various random number generators to spin the wheels and chose the Linear Congruential PseudoRandom number generator after "inventing" the Histogram (which was based on a VT100 program I wrote to make "snow" (*)s fall downward on a terminal that was intended to always scroll characters upward). My histogram utility proved to me that the LCG was the best pseudorandom number generator for this use. In addition to these distractions I finally got so bored that I started taking calls for assistance with programming problems from ex-students. Since I came into the office quite early (7AM) I would get all the calls from the East Coast and Canada (Ottawa) and have all the problems solved by the time the regular tech support people came in around 9AM or even as late as 10AM. Why should they come in at all? I had done all the work there was to do before they showed up, despite the fact I was just a trainer. I even started making trips to customer sites to solve the most difficult problems, and eventually that's all I did. I solved problems across the country that had stumped GenRad programming and service engineers for years. Every time I solved the problem and boy, there were some doozies! All of this while I wasn't even on the tech support or applications staff!
At Credence I picked up the STS3000 mixed signal training course, even though I knew zilch about mixed signal. I struggled along, spending time on the demo tester to learn everything I could about it and mixed signal testing. When the Asian sales guy asked me if there was a way to plot waveforms on a VT100 instead of a VT240, which none of the Asian customers had, I wrote a function to do just that. All that time I spent writing slot machine games and making it snow on a VT100 paid off when I mailed him a floppy with a PlotToVT100 program for his customers.
I took the DSP section of the STS3000 course from a one page summary (I am not kidding) to a full 150 page course, which was eventually used in the Duo and Quartet Mixed signal class, and ported to Multimedia CD ROM as an interactive self paced training course. Because the only West Coast apps engineer for the Mixed Signal product lines was often tied up, I became the defacto "Demo Guy" for the mixed signal product lines. Despite the fact that I was teaching nearly full time the salesmen would ask me to give demonstrations over my lunchtime. So I would come in early to setup the demo, teach class in the morning, give the sales demo over lunctime then go back to teaching the class without a break. I was happy to do it as the sales guys were very appreciative and I knew my efforts would be noticed. They were.
During my stint at Credence while sitting in a class on codecs and DSP I experienced an epiphany on the subject of aliasing. I had been interested in aliasing since I first learned sampling theory but no one I spoke with could explain how to calculate where the aliases would fall in the spectrum. The instructor of this class (a very nice guy from LTX) was trying to explain how aliasing worked. His explanation was interesting but the procedure that he was touting for calculating where an alias would go was too complicated, and worked only in frequency, whereas most of the time we work in frequency bins. While listening to this lecture I suddenly figured out the answer and wrote it down. It was brilliant and simple, and could be coded directly into a test program in any language. It is simply this;
if(bin_num > num_samples) bin_num = bin_num mod num_samples;
if(bin_num > num_samples/2) bin_num = num_samples - bin_num;
This technique was worked out by my brain, and now runs millions of times every day on testers all over the world. I taught it far and wide, gave it to the Duo training course developer, and got it integrated into tester software on multiple platforms. When I discovered a friend teaching it in his for profit DSP course I challenged him to at least give me credit. He did not see the value in my formula, and so refused. This was not the first time my ideas were taken and used without giving me credit, nor was it to be the last. After that I started referring the to formula as "Dan's Rules". They are mine, and I claim them.
I wrote many, many demos for the STS3000 tester, including one that demonstrated the interoperability of the AWG, Digitizer and Digital Subsystem that let the tester digitize the users voice, then speak back at him with his own voice, modified in many different ways. The real trick here was using digital match mode to digitize only when the user was speaking (as the digitizer memory was very limited) which allowed me to demonstrate how the digital subsystem could trigger the analog digitizer, which was a highly prized feature among users. The above mentioned LTX trainer at first thought it was an idiotic application, but when I presented my lecture on how the program worked he was thoroughly impressed with the technique.
Credence was not all that interested in selling the STS3000 series of testers but they were very interested in selling a new tester called the MT-1000 which would become known as the Duo and Quartet testers. This machine had a very high speed AWG and digitizer which was a lot of fun to play with. One interesting thing I did was to code a 1KHz modulated AM radio signal into the AWG, run it, then go out into the parking lot and listen to the signal on my car radio. That inspired me to develop a really cool demo. I learned and documented the AWG Packet programming (this becomes important later at Nextest) and created an NTSC TV Color Bars signal by hand editing waveform segments using various tools. This way I learned both TV signal generation and testing, and the AWG. My applications note on using the AWG was so thorough it was incorporated into the manual and my Color Bars signal was tweeked for customer demos by one of the marketing guys
The Credence Customer Service Support division hired a small private company to survey customers about their experiences with Credence equipment and employees. Apparently one of the items on the survey asked customers to nominate their choice for best customer service representative. I was voted the best customer service rep, problem was, I was NOT a customer service rep, I was a trainer. The really funny part was that my old boss from GenRad, Tony Lapetina worked for this survey company and recognized my name. He wasn't surprised that I was nominated the best customer service rep but he was surprised that I wasn't a customer service rep after all. Pretty funny.
I went to work for Schlumberger at Intel Ronler Acres and spent eighteen months as the local apps guy. I went there to quit traveling and to get away from C coding (I preferred Pascal at the time). Little did I know that I would have to become an expert at C, very deep and heavy C. I was up to the challenge and did very well there. When I left, Intel asked me to come back as an Intel employee. I couldn't because I don't have a degree, but it was nice that they asked.
I joined Credence again to work in the Marketing Department helping to promote the Duo and Quartet testers. The group was great, and my boss, Zoran promised to teach me marketing skills. In the end it was my teaching skills that I relied on most, as I could stand before a potential customer and create so much excitement and enthusiasm they would buy nearly anything. I introduced a new VI card and defined and oversaw the development of two new additions to the tester, and even devised a remote demo (the first that I had ever seen) of the new CP2 DSP processor while at Semicon Europa in Munich Germany. Using just a dial-up line I was able to run a DSP benchmark program on two testers in Hillsboro Oregon and show the comparative speed of the CP2 against the CP1, all the way from Germany. It was quite impressive despite the slow 9600 baud connection.
Below you can see a news segment from KTVU showing Semicon West 2000 and you'll actually see me doing a demonstration of a RAMDAC device test of linearity. At the end Dr. Siddall notes that out of all the companies at Semicon that year they picked ours. Could it be due to my live demo? Who knows?
I joined Nextest as the Senior Marketing Apps guy, and took on the budding Lightning variant of the Maverick tester. I devised wrote many cool demos for the Nextest, one was based on the "speech grabber" I did on the STS3000. Another nifty demo that was based on an original idea of Rick Carmichael's. He wanted to measure the speed of some object by its Doppler Shift using the Lightning's Analog Capture Instrument. I built many versions, a football with a Sonalert built in, a baseball, a remote control car, but we eventually decided to use a train for the demo, based on Rick's theme of "Nextest, the Light at the End of the Tunnel". The idea was that you hoped the light at the end of the tunnel was not an approaching train. I played the part of the "Light" in a white tux, including white shoes.
You can see in the picture below that the booth was constructed to look like a tunnel, when I stood at the podium, I was the "Light at the End of the Tunnel". Rather humbling, but I do what I am told, no matter how humiliating.
I placed a Sonalert inside a G scale train engine connected via a diode to the track voltage, so that anytime the train was moving forward, the Sonalert would sound. The train was on a 20 foot section of track (seen below) with opto-sensors at both ends of the track so I could tell when the train hit either end. A microphone was hidden in a little station house on the track, and Rick built a hand crank generator to control the speed of the train. Everything was connected to the tester which used the digital pins to measure the opto-sensors, the MS PMU read the voltage from the generator, and the ACI was prepared to capture the output of the microphone anytime the train left the starting point on the track. A test program that I wrote controlled the whole thing. When a customer cranked on the generator, the voltage from the generator was measured and that amount of voltage was sent to the track by the tester's DPSs. As soon as the train started moving from its starting point, it uncovered an opto-sensor which told the test program to start digitizing the microphone in the station house.
As the train approached the station house, the Sonalert waves were compressed due to the Doppler shift, raising the frequency, as it passed they were expanded, lowering the frequency. All of this was being captured by a microphone in the station house which was being digitized by the Analog Capture Instrument on the tester. Then the train passed over the EOT (end of track) opto-sensor, which started a cascade of actions. It stopped the ACI capture, and started the FFT of the captured waveform. It also applied a negative voltage to the track which effectively slammed on the brakes so the train could not shoot off the end of the track, and then caused it to slowly back up back to the starting position on the track. The track voltage was set to zero when the SOT (start of track) opto-sensor became shaded, meaning the demo was set to start again. In the meantime the FFT had finished and the speed of the train had been calculated based on the width of the spectral delta of the Sonalert signal captured by the ACI. The actual speed was divided by the scale factor of the train. It worked flawlessly, and one older gentleman came up to me during the show and told me in the 20 some odd years he had been going to these shows, he had never seen a better demo than mine. Click here for an explanation of the spectra and formula used to measure the train's speed.
At Nextest I had developed an extremely accurate method of measuring frequency using digital capture and FFTs that extended the testers range from 33MHz to nearly 600MHz. One of my favorite salesmen, Gib Hattery had a potential customer who in addition to lots of digital testing needed to measure high frequencies but they were not quite ready to commit to Nextest. Gib had told them about my technique, but they were skeptical. I suggested to Gib that I develop a one day seminar on the technique. It took me a week to put together the seminar, then I flew down and gave the class to their engineers. The next day the potential customer became a real customer and ordered over $5 million worth of testers.
Also at Nextest Steve Holder and I began working with MEMS (Micro-Electronic Mechanical Systems) devices after I visited Analog Devices on a sales call. During that sales call, Marty Mason told our host, Bob Malone that Nextest was new to mixed signal, and that we weren't sure we knew what we were doing. (Thanks Marty). Then I gave my presentation and demo. Bob turned to Marty and said "I think you know what you are doing." Anyway, we fooled around with a two channel AD accelerometer.
(By that I mean that I showed Analog Devices how to test four times as many parts in the same time and do a better job, but that's bragging).
Here is something else I did with it. I connected it to a 'scope and attached it to a hacksaw blade chucked in a vise. When I "strummed" the hacksaw blade as you would a guitar string, it generated a sine wave because of the back and forth acceleration, deceleration and so on of the accelerometer. In the picture you can see the MEMS device blurred as it swings in front of the camera.
if(bin_num > num_samples) bin_num = bin_num mod num_samples;
if(bin_num > num_samples/2) bin_num = num_samples - bin_num;
(By that I mean that I showed Analog Devices how to test four times as many parts in the same time and do a better job, but that's bragging).
Here is something else I did with it. I connected it to a 'scope and attached it to a hacksaw blade chucked in a vise. When I "strummed" the hacksaw blade as you would a guitar string, it generated a sine wave because of the back and forth acceleration, deceleration and so on of the accelerometer. In the picture you can see the MEMS device blurred as it swings in front of the camera.
Eventually Steve and I decided to put a MEMS accelerometer and a MEMS Gyroscope into the head of a golf club (even though neither of us golf). I designed a circuit to calculate the sum of the squares of the X and Y axis outputs so we could capture the acceleration of the club with one channel of the Lightning's ACI, then do the square root in DSP. The other channel of the ACI captured the Gyroscope signal so we could tell the head position throughout the golfer's swing. With this setup we had a VERY popular demo device for the 2006 Semicon West show.
To quote the press release:
Also on demonstration at SEMICON West is the Lightning PT test system. To further support the company's theme at the show: "Raising the Par", Nextest's booth has been transformed into the likeness of a golf course. Show attendees are invited to test their swing at a golf ball by using a special golf club -- while Lightning is busy testing and measuring the velocity of their swing. Lightning achieves this through the two-MEMS devices that are cleverly embedded in the golf club and directly linked through the shaft to the tester.
The booth was full of people wanting to swing the club. The test program that Steve wrote (I was taking care of Maxim) displayed the club head speed, ball impact force and club head angle so it could tell you whether you had nailed it, hooked it or sliced it and how badly. It also emitted humorous messages based on the parameters of your swing. Anyway, it was huge "hit" at the show, and the whole booth design was based on our demo. It was a golf course recreated at Semicon West. What was really funny is at the end of the show my boss, reflecting on the huge success of the show wondered out loud how he had come to choose a golf course for the booth's motif. I had to speak up, "It was our demo Rick!"
Also at Nextest I invented something I coined a "Palette AWG" for testing ISO 14443 contact-less smart cards. My wife is an artist, and I knew that when painting a painter chooses colors from her palette, which is what this circuit did. I had done this in software originally to generate smart card signals with the Lightning AWG. When we were tasked with developing a smart card tester, I remembered my little software invention and the work I had done creating NTSC TV signals with a Packet AWG and fleshed it out as a piece of hardware. Essentially, there were four palette memory segments, each containing a segment of a smart card waveform. Based on the input data stream a two flop circuit would select the appropriate waveform segment to stitch to the last segment to create a waveform stream for the smart card. Click on the picture to see an animated GIF of the Palette AWG in action.
Basically it would be doing an on-the-fly concatenation of waveform segments to create a modulated waveform stream to go to the smart card. Unfortunately instead of patenting the palette AWG, Nextest chose to patent the whole smart card tester (U.S. Patent Application No. 20060276989) based on my design and spread the credit out to everyone on the team. That means the palette AWG concept is public domain. Too bad.
Also at Nextest I devised many innovative techniques for testing. Many of them became applications notes and industry magazine articles. Here is a partial list:
A technique for measuring the jitter induced by a spread spectrum clock generator.
A technique for measuring frequencies far higher than the base frequency of a digital tester based on "Dan's Rules" (above). (Developed jointly with David Reynolds)
A technique for measuring the slope of a filter using periodic white noise. (Developed jointly with David Reynolds)
A technique for finding the NdB point of a filter using a binary search algorithm using a digital pin as the signal source. (Developed jointly with Steve Holder)
A technique for measuring the duty cycle and pulse width of an arbitrary clock with FAR more accuracy than the digital pin's Overall Timing Accuracy.
A technique for doing a three tone filter test in one shot using concatenated tone sets with each tone individually calibrated and pre-emphasized.
A technique to eliminate the annoying "pop" you get when changing audio sources in a TV or stereo. This last one is not patented and is INFINITELY superior to the standard zero crossing detector, which pretty much doesn't work because it's based on a false premise that the click comes from the end points of the two audio sources not lining up. This is bull, that's not the source of the "pop" at all, and I not only identified it, I solved it.
With virtually no help from the vendor I implemented a test program utilizing laser trimming and wrote an applications note documenting how to do it on the Nextest platform. This was the application that sold Maxim on the Nextest Lightning, making possible the sale of millions of dollars worth of product and proving the utility of the Lightning.