Engineering Education is Tough – And Needs to Stay That Way

Should engineering degrees be expanded to a five-year curriculum instead of four?  The knowledge, skills and techniques our new hires must master is extensive and exploding, and it’s hard to imagine how it can all be covered in just four years.

But in truth, the extra year wouldn’t likely make much of a difference for those we hire here at Keithley.  Our engineering projects are difficult;  we’re creating measurement solutions that range from picoamps to 50A.  Engineers must understand not only measurement science, but the ways various subsystems must interact (power supplies, software, mechanical packaging, manufacturability, etc.).  It’s not practical to expect graduates to leaves college with the hands-on experience to design solutions at that level.  Much of what we do here, and in most companies, is learned in on-the-job experience.

In truth, we find as much value in the non-technical aspects of the college engineering experience as in mastering the basic science and math. If you graduate with an engineering degree today, you bring to your job a toughness, a perseverance, a tenacity that will be just as important to your job performance as in the elegance of your designs.

Actually, most engineering degrees include a co-op component in the workplace, which effectively functions as a fifth year.  And in truth that additional year in the field is really critical, since no EE program can adequately prepare for the transition from theoretical engineering to practical application.  We’ve enjoyed strong partnerships with many leading universities in the region to create these educational experiences and certainly have found many of our best engineers over the years through our co-op relationships.  

The Apple Tastes Better When Savored Slowly

Here’s my last blog post – for now – in my series of recent posts on creating enduring products:

Lesson: Make sure that first bite isn’t more than you can chew.

I’ll tell you something we don’t necessarily broadcast to the outside world:  the first two product concepts for our very successful Model 4200-SCS platform, which were based in part on input from customer focus groups, didn’t receive top management approval. Quite simply, their scope was too large to succeed in a reasonable time—it was just too big of a bite. Despite the undeniable value of their insights, customers in focus groups often have no concept of what it takes to bring a sophisticated system of this type to market.

During concept development, it’s critical to invest your energy in making sure you have a complete and compelling narrative to present to top management and that it’s presented in such a way that they can readily see how it will be carried through to completion. The development team’s early mistake was thinking about it like engineers (the “coolness” and technology of the measurements involved) rather than like top managers (is this a do-able product in a reasonable timeframe?).

The development team spent a lot of time “descoping” the project, whittling it down to a manageable level of technical risk. However, what finally convinced top managers that the Model 4200-SCS represented a viable product concept was our technical and marketing people taking them on the road with them. The conversation took place between Keithley’s technical people and the people who would actually be using the product—top management was a “fly on the wall,” silently absorbing what the lab managers needed and wanted from a product of this type. Over the years, we’ve often found that nothing beats a face-to-face meeting between management and customers for communicating the potential of a new product.

Patience is More than a Virtue. It’s Hard.

When I wrote earlier blog posts about creating enduring product ideas, I thought about it in general terms.  But when I began thinking about creating products in the semiconductor industry in particular, I realized it takes special, shall we say, fortitude to be a product developer in this sector.

Lesson: If you’re developing solutions for a cyclical industry like the semiconductor industry, be prepared to be persistent through its ups and downs.

In a traditional business model, R&D spending is based on the revenues a product is producing; that means too many companies tend to cut back on their development investments when there’s an industry downturn. However, companies that abruptly turn off the “money spigot” when there’s a cyclical downturn simply aren’t in a position to profit from the next market upturn when it arrives. Still worse, they’ve lost credibility with their customers by not being prepared to address their new needs.

One of the things Keithley does, in addition to long-term planning, is to focus on short-term, fast-response projects, so that when we spot an industry trend, such as organic solar cells, that requires specific measurement capabilities, we can address that opportunity very quickly. 

Lessons from Our Customers

Earlier I wrote about creating long-term value in product development, and how to uncover the real insights that lead to products that last for years.  Another “lesson-learned” we’ve thought about involved creating a long-term roadmap for the product, one that begins before Launch Day.

Lesson: You must lay out the upgrade path for the product and factor it into its architecture long before you introduce the first version.

At Keithley during the 1990s, our market research had informed us that those working in semiconductor labs were typically unhappy with the fixed-configuration characterization systems then available. All too often, they were being forced to purchase a completely new system every few years to address new test needs because their existing ones lacked flexibility. We created a test system, the Model 4200-SCS, that was originally envisioned to evolve over time so that we could offer customers a product that protected their instrumentation investment over the long term.

We took that upgrade path concept to heart, and today we write five-year “roadmaps” for the Model 4200-SCS. This roadmap is designed to parallel industry technology milestones as laid out in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) and our customers’ individual corporate roadmaps.  It’s a concept we’ve applied throughout our product line beyond the Model 4200 to our SourceMeter® Source-Measure Units and other primary measurement platforms.  Mapping our products to industry and customer roadmaps has been a vital strategy in creating enduring measurement platforms, not “me-too” instrument solutions.

Engineering Products That Stand the Test of Time

Every product has a lifespan, some measured in months, some in years. Test instruments are not the same as smartphones, of course – we typically seek to build high-value enduring “platforms” that will last several years and stand the test of time for our customers.

Easy to say, hard to do, in any competitive environment. Aside from the commonplace answers of “staying close to customers” and “anticipating the market,” just how DO you build an enduring product? We came up with a few common themes that have driven our more successful product technologies:

Lesson: Listening is hard. Learn how to do it well.
Product development at times seems to be a black art. Perhaps that explains the tremendous number of annual product launches that fail. But at its core, uncovering true opportunity resides on understanding what the customer says, and doesn’t say. The unarticulated need is often the difference between understanding the difference between features that are “nice to have” versus “have to have.” Teaching your marketers and engineers how to ask questions, and pull true insights from customer conversations, lies at the core of creating real value in product development. The psychology of questioning is vitally important to understand. For instance, “what else” will elicit far more than “is there anything else?” Very subtle, but very powerful. Or, one of our marketers loved the question, “what problem does that solve?” He felt that simple query yielded a treasure trove of creative insights.

Of course, we do the typical steps of customer visits, visiting trade shows and conferences. We’re always searching for the new application for our products that can yield to new solutions. One method we’ve used is Google Scholar, which we’ve found to be a powerful scanning tool to uncover ideas we may not hear of otherwise. For instance, during the last decade, we’ve learned researchers far outside the semiconductor lab are using the Model 4200-SCS in some astonishing ways. Just by searching for “Keithley 4200” using Google Scholar, we’re constantly discovering the results of research in technologies that simply didn’t exist when the system was introduced.

I’ll address other lessons-learned in product development practices in later blog posts. For now, remember that your customers are talking to you. Go listen to them.

Engineering Products That Stand the Test of Time

Every product has a lifespan, some measured in months, some in years.  Test instruments are not the same as smartphones, of course – we typically seek to build high-value enduring “platforms” that will last several years and stand the test of time for our customers.

Easy to say, hard to do, in any competitive environment.  Aside from the commonplace answers of “staying close to customers” and “anticipating the market,” just how DO you build an enduring product?  We came up with a few common themes that have driven our more successful product technologies:

Lesson: Listening is hard.  Learn how to do it well. 

Product development at times seems to be a black art.  Perhaps that explains the tremendous number of annual product launches that fail.  But at its core, uncovering true opportunity resides on understanding what the customer says, and doesn’t say.  The unarticulated need is often the difference between understanding the difference between features that are “nice to have” versus “have to have.”  Teaching your marketers and engineers how to ask questions, and pull true insights from customer conversations, lies at the core of creating real value in product development.  The psychology of questioning is vitally important to understand.  For instance, “what else” will elicit far more than “is there anything else?”  Very subtle, but very powerful.  Or, one of our marketers loved the question, “what problem does that solve?”  He felt that simple query yielded a treasure trove of creative insights.

Of course, we do the typical steps of customer visits, visiting trade shows and conferences.  We’re always searching for the new application for our products that can yield to new solutions.  One method we’ve used is Google Scholar, which we’ve found to be a powerful scanning tool to uncover ideas we may not hear of otherwise.  For instance, during the last decade, we’ve learned researchers far outside the semiconductor lab are using the Model 4200-SCS in some astonishing ways. Just by searching for “Keithley 4200” using Google Scholar, we’re constantly discovering the results of research in technologies that simply didn’t exist when the system was introduced.

I’ll address other lessons-learned in product development practices in later blog posts.  For now, remember that your customers are talking to you.  Go listen to them.

New High Voltage Devices Will Change Parametric Test

Many parametric test engineers are learning to cope with high voltage process requirements for new applications such as high brightness LEDs. Not surprisingly, high voltage processes require high voltage parametric testing for process control and reliability monitoring.

Most of yesterday’s device technologies were limited to under 100V. Such devices were easily characterized with existing parametric test systems.

Consider, for example, Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) technology. The term BCD is often used to describe a number of variants, including combinations such as CMOS-LDMOS, NMOS-LDMOS, etc. Today, BCD devices have emerged that use LDMOS to support voltages as high as 700V or 800V, demonstrating the upward trend. It’s expected that BCD technologies will exceed 1000V by about 2012.

Such high voltage devices are currently used for applications such has High Intensity Discharge (HID) illumination, where a combination of high voltage and high power is needed. There are a variety of applications for high voltage BCDs, including:

• Industrial controls (motor and actuator control)

• Automotive controls (lighting, engine control, drive train control, etc.)

• Advanced lighting (LED, HID, etc.)

• Power conversion and storage

• Display (backlight)

These devices require special consideration when developing a parametric test strategy. Part of the challenge lies in the fact that the new high voltage requirements add to rather than subtract from the roster of parametric tests. In many if not most cases, the high voltage transistors are controlled by complex logic that requires low voltage/low current parametric test. Consequently, both high voltage and logic tests have to be addressed within the same test plan while minimizing impact on throughput.

The roadmap for BCD technologies and related processes over the next two to five years clearly indicates the need to move beyond 1000V in parametric test. This will pose a number of challenges for high voltage parametric test systems. Instrumentation is likely the least significant of the challenges; however, probing at more than 1500V will almost certainly be much more challenging.

It’s As Much About People as Performance

As much as we engineers feel that pure technology advances trump all, we’re reminded of the powerful impact human nature has on the adoption of the technology we create. I’m returning from a spring break vacation season where it seems that EVERYONE I see in airports and hotels is carrying around either an iPhone or an iPad. While the iPad in particular certainly presents an example of elegant engineering, as a computing device it’s not particularly groundbreaking. There’s not that much you can do with the tablet that you can’t already do with your laptop, and some would even say it offers less functionality than a laptop. Yet its consumer appeal is undeniable. Why? Because of the Apple brand? Perhaps. Actually, I’d point more to the power of the interface as the true breakthrough here. The intuitiveness, the bright screen, the light packaging all combine to appeal to us as humans in ways that can extend far beyond advances in engineering performance. And if we think of past great leaps forward in consumer electronics, they often don’t stem from a performance but rather to interface innovation, such as the circle control wheel on the iPod, the one-click simplicity of iTunes, or even the early Macintosh operating system. There were other offerings that competed with each of the above, and which were sometimes superior from an engineering perspective. However, the more engaging human interface of these examples proved to be the winning advantage.


The test industry should draw (at least) two lessons from this. Of course, the first lesson is that this latest burst of consumer innovation in smart phones, tablets, netbooks, and the like is good for business, because it has coincided with the rise of another generation of ICs that need to be tested. The test industry is driven by innovation in consumer electronics, as every new round of development is accompanied by new cycles of device characterization for the next evolution of chips. Further, Apple’s innovation has shown the semiconductor industry that it’s not a zero sum game – the iPod nano created a whole new category, as did the iPhone, and, most recently, the iPad. Consumer demand doesn’t just shift from a netbook to a tablet – it expands and creates higher volumes of purchases and therefore increases the demand for semiconductors.

The second lesson is that the T&M industry’s attempts to improve instrument interfaces, with touch screens and color displays, is important to our engineering customers, even if they don’t necessarily articulate that during a Voice of the Customer exercise. As people become more comfortable and familiar with these new user interfaces, they expect all their devices – cars, washing machines and even test instruments – to meet the same ease of use standard. We must pay more attention to the way our customers interact with our measurement tools in order to make the tools as powerful and useful as possible.