In honor of International Women in Engineering Day, I have an extra podcast episode this week! My guests are Dawn Vertz from Kohler Energy, Sarah Boen from Tektronix and Rosa Chow from TDK. I sat down with each of these esteemed engineers and discussed their journeys into the world of high tech, how the EE landscape has changed over the years and what they would like to see in … Read More → "Fish Fry Special Edition: International Women in Engineering Day"
While writing my recent 8-part EDA history (listed below), I became acutely aware that most of the effort devoted to EDA tool development has been aimed at IC design. A much smaller level of effort was devoted to developing printed circuit board (PCB) tools. The reason is simple, I think. IC design tools sell for far more money. While IC design tools cost upwards of six and … Read More → "A Brief History of PCBs: Where did printed circuit boards come from?"
Lynn Conway is best known for her collaboration with Carver Mead that resulted in the Mead-Conway design methodology for VLSI chip design, which triggered a renaissance in IC development and spurred the growth of commercial EDA. While working on IBM’s Advanced Computer System (ACS) project in the 1960s, Conway conceived of Dynamic Instruction Scheduling (DIS), one of the fundamental innovations needed for out-of-order (OOO) instruction execution by superscalar processors, which is now commonly implemented in all high-end microprocessors. She joined the Department of Engineering’s faculty at the University of Michigan in 1985 as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Associate Dean of Engineering and retired in 1998, taking the title of Professor Emerita. …
Read More → "Lynn Conway, 1938-2024: The Computer Architect Who Helped to Revolutionize Digital IC Design"Are you powered up for today’s Fish Fry? I certainly hope so! My podcast guest Frank Heidemann (National Instruments) and I are diving into the world of power semiconductors. We chat about recent trends in the power semiconductor market, the benefits of wide bandgap power semiconductors and the role that power semiconductors will play for the future of electric vehicles. Also this week, I check out a new … Read More → "All Powered Up: EVs, Wide Bandgap, and Saving the World with Power Semiconductors"
I love digital logic. I love solving digital logic conundrums. And I especially love discovering interesting and unusual ways of doing things while also learning more about the people who came up with these ideas in the first place. Take Gray codes, for example. These were named after Frank Gray, who was a physicist and researcher at Bell Labs.
The Gray code, or … Read More → "Who Invented the Johnson Decade Counter (and Why)?"
I simply cannot believe that I recently penned and posted my three hundredth column here at EEJournal. I think my columns average out at around 1,500 words apiece, which means we are talking about (pause while I launch my calculator app) 450,000 words!
The really sad thing is that when I was 16 years old circa 1973, my dear old mom did everything but … Read More → "O-M-G! 100 More Captivating Columns"
