The Engineering Mind

I have been at ADI now for the last 8 years and am working on year 9.  This is fairly short by ADI standards with many here with 15-20+ year tenures.  However, in my total career now of about 14 years I have been able to see a good bit of a...

In my last blog, I wrote about a young man from Ohio who came to Boston and worked feverishly in a Scollay Square laboratory on an invention whose sale he hoped would start him on his fortune. But the young man was unable to sell the device an...

In my last several blogs I've been talking a lot about radiation testing.  At the beginning of the series of blogs I've been posting we looked at the various types of radiation testing that are performed for products going into space application...

It was April 21, 1916 and the people of Chicago were enjoying a beautiful Spring day, their city's grueling winter behind them and the unrelenting heat of summer a few months ahead. The Chicago Cubs baseball team had opened their first season at the ...

When he arrived in Boston in the summer of 1868 he did not look like a man who would someday change the world.  Clutching all his worldly possessions in a canvas bag, he was the very definition of a "hayseed," a country boy who came ...

Hello once again!  I hope that you have been enjoying my recent series on single event effects with high speed ADCs.  So far we have looked at TID (Total Ionizing Dose), SEL (Single Event Latchup), and SET (Single Event Transient).  T...

Have you ever listened to AM radio at night and wondered how you could hear stations from great distances away, but not hear them during the day? So have scientists and researchers, who have spent decades trying to understand what's going o...

If you've been reading my blog for the last several months you know I have been discussing a lot of radiation effects and have given an example with these effects on a high speed ADC.  Last month I started talking about single event transients...

Working as I do here for the global leader of high-performance signal processing solutions, I often speak or write about Analog Devices and how our semiconductor products represent the "state of the art."  The challenge for ADI (in fact, ...

We had our most successful year as a group of ADI teams at the World Championship events in Houston and Detroit. It was record-setting, both for individual teams and for the program! We had a total of eight teams attend Championship and ADI hosted ...

I’m back again to talk about my hobby of ham radio. Last time I wrote about the experimental antenna I recently built on my property for operating on the low (1.8 – 2.0 MHz) Amateur Radio bands. Today I’m going to go back to my early days in the ho...

In my last few blog post we've been looking at radiation effects on high speed ADCs.  We started the journey discussing TID effects and moved over to the current topic of SEEs (single event effects).  This month the topic in particular is...

It surprises some people to learn that, though cell phones offer inexpensive, instantaneous communication worldwide, there are still millions of active ham radio operators around the world. We like to say that there is something for everyone in our...

I may work at the world's leading designer and manufacturer of analog and mixed signal semiconductor solutions, but my first love was an old tube radio in my parent's basement. Growing up during the 1960s I would listen to Top-40 AM radio stations fr...

As the early competition season wraps up, the season for many teams is now over. But for lots of our ADI teams, the excitement is just beginning. New England Championships is this coming weekend, and other teams across the globe are now learning if...

I may work at the world's leading designer and manufacturer of analog and mixed signal semiconductor solutions, but my first love was an old tube radio in my parent's basement. Growing up during the 1960s I would listen to Top-40 AM radio stations ...

I've been covering radiation effects over my last few posts and have transitioned into a discussion on these effects with high speed ADCs.  It is a logical progression for me considering my time here at ADI with the high speed applications tea...

I have been covering the basics of radiation effects over my last few blogs on Planet Analog and this time I discussed a bit about TID effects.  These are a little simpler to evaluate as the test procedure is relatively simple.  Of course...

Every year I always look forward to bag day. It's usually filled with excitement, scramble, and way too much coffee way too late in the evening. But any way you cut it, Bag Day is the culmination of a rough 6 weeks of nonstop work. On Team 2655, i...

Now that I am working in the space products group at Analog Devices I pay much more close attention to various events occurring that are related to space and its exploration.  We are now just a few short weeks into 2018 and we have already had...

One of the blogs I follow regularly is that of John V-Neun from Team 148 the Robowranglers, a team that many in FRC are very familiar with. People like to think that all of the powerhouse teams just magically come up with a robot that works, or, he...

I started talking about radiation effects last month in my blog on Planet Analog.  In that blog post I looked at the cumulative effects that are observed.  In my latest installment this month on Planet Analog I discuss the different singl...

Before I begin this week's blog, I wanted to let you all know that jchong made some major updates to the IMU library code on GitHub. There is now complete support for all three official languages (LabVIEW, C++, and Java) and handy guides specific t...

Most of the time, FIRST is a fun way for me to volunteer my time to help create the future generation of engineers and to better the lives of young high school students in my local community. But then there are those special days when I actually l...

It's that time of year once again as thousands of high school students across the globe begin the scramble to design, build, and test a robot in 6 weeks. This year's challenge has just been released this morning and I'm just as excited for ...