Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1256432
16 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2020 something that did not connect with what Rick was saying. To figure out what was true and wasn't took quite a bit of time. In the near term, they have to go look online for some of the people who do understand this. Right now, that's me and Rick and Lee. You have to look for things that don't make sense. You can, like Rick said, always count on the app note circuit being correct. They have probably given you a functional start, but it's when it starts to get into layout. The funda- mental thing is, "Are they telling you to de- sign transmission lines where the returns are the same copper that the energy comes from?" Those are the ones where you start to say, "I'm not going to pay any more attention to their layout advice because it doesn't have any ba- sis in science." Matties: When you think you know it, there's more to learn. Beeker: The big problem is that the "consum- ers" of engineers—the companies who hire them—are not complaining; they aren't go- ing back to universities, saying, "We need to change the skillset that your graduates are coming into the field with." And then, to make it worse, they are not willing to send their engi- neers to training, but they're willing to pay for 3–5 iterations of a circuit board each time with their fingers crossed and eyes closed. Matties: But you talked about the complain- ing. Sometimes, they don't even know to com- plain because maybe they're not doing mul- tiple iterations. Instead, they may be buying a $150 board when, with the proper approach, it could have been a $30 board. Beeker: And that's if they're lucky enough and it works, which is a very rare exception. The boards almost always fail tests, and they have to race to get new boards designed, try to get enough parts—which might often be scarce because they're developing early articles—beg for time in the chamber, and still not be sure they're going to pass. My automotive custom- ers will admit that it's three or four times, and they do not budget for either the cost or the time, but they still will not send their engineers to train. They're very happy to let me teach them for free. Shaughnessy: This sounds like what we heard in a recent survey about cost-aware design. Many of the senior designer respondents said that cost is not something that they worry about until they get it almost to assembly, and then they try to get the cheapest components and save money that way. A lot of respondents said cost is a manufacturing thing, not a de- sign problem. Beeker: All my customers would draw their de- signs with a pencil and a piece of paper if they could get away with it. The other challenge is the young engineers, even if they do un- derstand it, because they were paying atten- tion both in their fields classes and their cir- cuit classes and figured out the two are con- nected somehow. They get into these compa- nies where there are old farts like me who are dead in the circuit land, and they aren't strong enough in their confidence to fight them about it; they get forced into submission to follow these worthless design guidelines that caused their designs to fail. Then, their confi- dence gets reduced even more when original- ly they probably knew this was not the right thing to do. When I first started to understand this, I still wasn't strong enough in my belief in fields. Even though Ralph Morrison kept telling me over and over again, "It's all about the space." I would go back to my teammates, and they would want to argue about it and start talking about return current instead of transmission lines. I couldn't win. After 15 years of working with Rick and Ralph, I'll fight to the death to prove that science is real. You have to look for things that don't make sense.