Engineers' Way

An engineer is an engineering professional concerned with developing economical and safe solutions to practical problems, by applying mathematics and scientific knowledge while considering technical constraints. That's what Wiki says about an Engineer.

Engineers have sculpted this world the way we wanted and as always, we are hungry for new stuff (Necessity is the mother of invention, you see).And No doubt, everthing you imagine is going to get materialised in the near future. Don't worry... this is not going to be on those hi-fi stuff that the engineers have given this world. This is about the day-to-day things that an Engineer will apply himself. And somebody might ask...I did Mechanical but typing out J2EE codes at XYZ now. And the answer is, Irrespective of the branch you belong and the occupation you are at, There is this Engineers' way of looking at and doing things, I beleive. There will be a considerable individuality in the way an engineer looks around and imagines stuff.

I just spurt out a few things I have noted in me (peruma !!!) and my friends, all these years that has an engineer's touch. Me being an Electronics engineer, this article might be electronics centric but you can always post a comment on how you looked at things :)

So feel proud and read ahead !!!

Search of a term in a book - You will always head towards the index pages at the end of the book, rather than looking into a chapter banking on the familiarity of that chapter in the book.

Deletion of a file in Computer - You always know deletion is all about losing the address of a pointer to the first memory location of that file. So, shift-del shouldn't take more than a second but simple deletion will create a replica of that file in the recycle bin - so it takes some time.

Laptop batteries - You know a laptop battery should be used in proper "full charge-full discharge" cycles. I always imagine it to be capacitors charging and discharging - though it might not be exactly what is happening in a battery. But, Its the way you look at things, that matter.

Digital Speedometer - I have seen people complaining the accuracy of the digital speedometer in motorbikes and the superiority of Analog speedometers over digital ones. But I always think it is "Rotation of the wheel - transducer - Analog to Digital Conversion – Digital Signal Processing - Display" in real time. You never feel like complaining about it anymore, Right ?.After all, It’s always about getting better every iteration.

Kitchens – There are instances we discussed how Induction stove works on field principles, eddy currents and all that. It might not be exactly correct but we throw in some techie terms and derive an understanding of it.

Railway Stations & Traffic Signals – Anybody with a knowledge of Finite State Machine (FSM) will realise “it’s not a big deal to design one of those red-green-yellow-light systems” around. After all, it’s only a FSM and We know what it is !!!

Computer Hangs – After working in a ASIC design & Verification environment, I never felt angry when my computer hangs. We are simply aware of how complex the system is...

You watch a movie – seek it to some point – it takes a fraction of a second to resume playing – You realise “Linked list” there.

You have the same set of speakers – But VLC player provides a 400 % volume but the other media players weren’t that loud. You can always google and find the VLC’s technology but I always try to associate it with a loop structure. The more number of times it loops, the more volume it provides. This might be an absurd imagination – But you have started imagining which is supposed to be the purpose of Education.

Flow of signals through an interconnect wire – has always been so magical to me and they suggest a new thing every while.

A plug socket or a tap or an electric stove isn’t working – Instead of panic-ing around and call a technician, you start looking through what’s happening and try to solve it on your own.

Resistive heating, fan regulators, watches, Neon lamps all will convey an engineering sense to you, unknowingly... Even if you don’t give it a thought.

No, I am not saying that you should look everything around with a scientific eye and catch some engineering sense out of it. That way, you lose the beauty of life. You can’t obviously discuss geostationary stuff and Neil Armstrong to your girlfriend who expects some poetic discussions from you on “Moon”. And, my point is this ... Unconsciously you will have that engineering sense in you. Courtesy: Your Engineering degree.

So, this is what I feel is the purpose of Engineering Education, kickstarting the Imagination and creativity. And every Engineer will have it nurtured in him unknowingly and unnoticeably.

This post was supposed to be published on the Engineer’s day, 15th of September (Sir M.Visweswaraya’s birthday). It’s a bit late ... :)

June 12, 2009 - An eventful day ...

June 12th,2009 has been an eventful day for me for various reasons.The reasons for celebrating this day are more than one,in my case and this blog will share them with you.

1) DTV Transition:
The first reason is that a wholesome "Transition to Digital TV" is complete in the US on this historic day and from this date on, we bid a farewell to the Analog broadcast and the TV Stations will only broadcast digital signals.The DTV is going to revolutionize the TV watching experience round the globe and get ready to enjoy television with better picture and sound quality.

The switch from analog to digital broadcast television is referred to as the digital TV (DTV) transition. In 1996, the U.S. Congress authorized the distribution of an additional broadcast channel to each broadcast TV station so that they could start a digital broadcast channel while simultaneously continuing their analog broadcast channel. Later, Congress set June 12, 2009 as the final date that full power television stations can broadcast analog signals. As of June 13, 2009, full power television stations will only broadcast digital, over-the-air signals.

As of now, the principal advantages of DTV that are discussed are superior audio and video quality compared to the analog broadcast and the "Multicasting".Google "multicasting" for details :)

This website http://www.dtv.gov/ provides the entire details about this DTV Transition and go through it if interested.

Its in the US and what has it got to do with India, might be the next question.The point is,the technology has arrived and is on the way and it won't take much time before India embraces the DTV broadcast.The count down begins...

And on my part, I am already a part of this revolution as I have worked on the Memory Controller that goes into the DTV Chip,manufactured by Broadcom (During my final year project with Broadcom) and this makes it more special. :)

2) BCM 7420 Tapeout
I am not a part of Broadcom anymore but BCM 7420 happens to be the first chip(designed by Broadcom) that I worked on in my professional career.Its a Set-Top box chip and during my one year tenure at Broadcom,I witnessed its design and verification from the head (neck atleast) till toes and the chip tapes-out on this day 12th June,2009.Tape-out is an event that marks the departure of the design from the Software format(Netlist) to the hardware format(to the foundry).

Since this guy(BCM 7420) happens to be the first chip I have kept my hands on, he is so special for me.

3) BITS Pilani recognises me as an Engineer !!!
Last but not least,this day has gotta be so special personally.I graduate out from my college with a M.Sc and a B.E degree.It's the final day of my PS-II and BITS-Pilani proudly launches another batch of engineers (of around 1000 people) to the country and I am one among them.

Its a great day that shouldn't be forgotten...

William Shockley's Interview Question @ Shockley Semiconductor Lab

In August 1957 William Shockley was recruiting staff for his Palo
Alto, California, start-up, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Shockley had been part of the Bell Labs team that invented the transistor. He had quit his job and come west to start his own company, telling people his goal was to make a million dollars. Everyone thought he was crazy. Shockley knew he wasn't. Unlike a lot of the people at Bell Labs, he knew the transistor was going to be big.



William Shockley(seated),John Bardeen and Walter Brattain,1948 - Bell Labs

Shockley had an idea about how to make transistors cheaply. He was going to fabricate them out of silicon. He had come to this valley, south of San Francisco, to start production.He felt like he was on the cusp of history, in the right place at the right time. All that he needed was the right people. Shockley was leaving nothing to chance.

Today's interview was with Jim Gibbons. He was a young guy, early twenties. He already had a Stanford Ph.D. He had studied at Cambridge too - on a Fulbright scholarship he'd won. Gibbons was sitting in front of him right now, in Shockley's Quonset hut office. Shockley picked up his stopwatch.

There's a tennis tournament with one hundred twenty-
seven players, Shockley began, in measured tones. You've got one hundred twenty-six people paired off in sixty-three matches, plus one unpaired player as a bye. In the next round, there are sixty-four players and thirty-two matches. How many matches, total, does it take to determine a winner?

Shockley started the stopwatch.

The hand had not gone far when Gibbons replied:
One hundred twenty-six.

How did you do that?
Shockley wanted to know. Have you heard this before?

Gibbons explained simply that it takes one match to eliminate one player. One hundred twenty-six players have to be eliminated to leave one winner. Therefore, there have to be 126 matches.

Shockley almost threw a tantrum. That was how he would have solved the problem, he told Gibbons. Gibbons had the distinct impression that Shockley did not care for other people using "his" method.

Shockley posed the next puzzle and clicked the stop-watch again. This one was harder for Gibbons. He thought a long time without answering. He noticed that, with each passing second, the room's atmosphere grew less tense.

Shockley,seething at the previous answer, now relaxed like a man sinking into a hot bath. Finally, Shockley clicked off the stopwatch and said that Gibbons had already taken twice the lab average time to answer the question. He reported this with charitable satisfaction. Gibbons was hired.

Excerpt from: How would you move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's cult of the puzzle : how the world's smartest companies select the most creative thinkers by William Poundstone.

OCES/DGFS - 2009 (Electronics)

I tried to steal from my memory, the questions I encountered at the OCES/DGFS exam 2009.These are a part of the screening test,which is a objective written test of 2 hours duration.There were a total of 100 questions,completely on Electronics only.No questions on Engineering maths and aptitude questions.

1) Thin film transistors are made up of ___
2) XOR gate acts as the inverter if one of the inputs is tied to one.
3) Skin depth - Frequency of the signal determines determines the depth of the EM wave in the metal.
4) VHDL - Declaration of entity is compulsory.
5) Modulation is required for having practical Antenna diamensions.
6) Minterm is each square in the K-map.
7) matched pair of transistors are absolutely essential for differential pair amplifier.
8) DACs and ADCs - Successive approximation type and flash type.
9) Dependence of the KVA rating of the transformer on the frequency.
10) Number of address lines that are required to address a certain nth memory location.
11) 2's complement arithmetic - how many numbers can we represent etc.
12) Order of the given IIR filter
13) Ebers-Moll equation is used in BJTs
14) self-inductance,Mutual inductance,coil,Number of turns etc.
15) Transmission lines - Conditions for Distortionless and lossless transmission line.
16) VSWR - Problem on the VSWR given the characteristic impedance of the line and the load impedance.
17) Silicon can't be used in LEDs - why ??
18) Direct bandgap and indirect bandgap semiconductors.
19) ADC Resolution calculation - provided full scale voltage and the percentage of error in output tolerance.
20) Single multiplying DAC is used in ___
21) binary to decimal decoder uses which kind of logic.
22) In BCD, each decimal is represented by a nibble.
23) stacks in a microprocessor can be accessed via sequential access.
24) Function of program counter in a microprocessor is __
25) Instruction cycle of the microprocessor.
26) ECL is faster - why ??
27) In intrinsic semiconductor,the current flow is due to __
28) Functions of ALE,READY signal etc in 8085 Microprocessor.
29) The stack implementation in 8085 MP is __
30) Correlation,auto-correlation and cross-correlation.
31) Anti-aliasing filter is __
32) Hall effect.
33) Conduction band and valence band of semiconductor.
34) Diode circuits - Fullwave and halfwave rectifiers.
35) Opamp circuits - Summing amplifier.
36) The purpose of the coupling capacitor in the amplifier output.
37) 32 to 1 mux - implemented using 8 to 1 mux and 4 to 1 mux.
38) Unique properties and advantages with the various logic families like ECL,TTL etc.
39) A question on Potentiometer and a question on temperature sensors.
40) A typical design flow of an ASIC chip.
41) stages in the synthesis and various inputs to the synthesis.
42) Problem related to the percentage of modulation and the side bands power and carrier power etc.
43) A few problems on basic circuit theory - calculation of currents and voltages in a network.
44) A problem on D-flipflop in which the Q` (Q bar) is fed as the input D to the flop.

That's all folks ...