Jeff
There is no one way. Each of us must find our own.
As for the comment about contractors. Yep. I have not been a contractor since
the very early nineties. I've been a consultant for over 25 years, and always
had multiple clients. This was a conscious business strategy to avoid being in
a position where I could not tell the truth as I understood it. As a result, I
take it as a badge of honor that I was able to always be straight with my
customers. That is what they paid me to do.
Scott
Scott McMorrow, CTO Signal Integrity Group
Samtec
Office 401-284-1827 | +1-800-726-8329
www.samtec.com
-----Original Message-----
From: si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Loyer, Jeff
Sent: Thursday, October 5, 2017 11:18 AM
To: si-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [SI-LIST] Re: Keynote Speeches from EDICon Last month
At the risk of folks thinking I've sold my soul, I'd like to say that I feel
especially honored to have worked many years for the "the man". It gave me
exposure to people and tools that might not be available otherwise, and I came
away feeling like I'd worked in the "Bell Labs of the 21st Century". I had
several bosses who worked hard to enable my efforts, and I'm still awestruck by
the people I got to work with. It often made going to work a pleasure. And to
witness your work in millions of designs - that's pretty heady stuff!
Having said that, the wisest thing I've done is to always keep 6 months of
salary readily available so I could jump ship if it got too ugly. That's been
a lifesaver (yes, you can change careers within a big company). I'd strongly
suggest that for everyone, including those self-employed (I respectfully
disagree with Scott that contractors often get to say exactly what they feel
and still stay steadily employed).
There's no "always good" or "always bad" way/place to work. Enjoy what work
you can and enjoy time-off when work stinks.
Talks of Merced, Rambus, FSB, etc. make me smile and wince (yes, you can design
a server stackup as SGSP if forced to, but you may be up to fab "j" before it
ships), thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Cheers,
Jeff Loyer
-----Original Message-----
From: si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Ransom Stephens
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2017 4:08 PM
To: si-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [SI-LIST] Re: Keynote Speeches from EDICon Last month
Quick note, and boy does it feel weird for me to defend The Man, but:
Back when I worked for Agilent (a.k.a., Keysight), I never held back and two
out of the three bosses I had during my tenure there defended my right to
question executives and management. One even quoted "Dave and Bill" in my
defense. I once told an SVP that I felt like Huck Finn with a hand on a wooden
tiller trying to turn a container ship and he actually got it and let me turn
the ship (jitter).
Of course, there was also the time I declared that as long as the concerns of
engineers were ignored, I would never attend another company meeting.
That went over less well.
;)
_____________________________
Ransom W. Stephens, Ph.D.
Signal Integrity Sage
Named the 2017 Jim Williams ACE Contributor of the Year for content that
advances engineering and design Ransom's Notes: Training, content, and
consulting/analysis since 2005 www.ransomsnotes.com
Measure of Things - Science & Technology blog at Electronics Design News:
science from the perspective of a technologist, technology from the perspective
of a scientist
Eye on the Standards - Keeping you up to date on developments in high speed
specifications
Twitting @ransomstephens
LinkedIn, Facebook and all that stuff
-----Original Message-----
From: si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Scott McMorrow
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2017 3:30 PM
To: chris.cheng@xxxxxxx; si-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [SI-LIST] Re: Keynote Speeches from EDICon Last month
Chris understands. Sometimes in betting your job you just have to
move ahead to another opportunity before the current one overtakes you.
Rambus was a great technology for streams that could be pipelined. It
was totally inappropriate for Servers or Laptops, and was marginal
even in Desktops at the time. Follow on chipsets using SDRAM were
also hampered by the bus. IIRC Intel took around a $1B loss in
chipsets around this time, not to mention several processors in the
family that were aborted before making it to market.
The nice thing about being a consultant who had many clients was that
I was not beholden to Intel or any company, so I could tell the truth
in meetings. Perhaps, I would argue, if you are stifling yourself in
meetings and communication, because of culture, pushback from above,
or the fear of being fired, you might be in the wrong job.
Obviously these are often personal decisions that one must make, but
from where I'm sitting I want engineers to challenge me, to call BS,
and to speak the convictions of their own engineering and personal knowledge.
Always.
Scott McMorrow, CTO Signal Integrity Group Samtec Office 401-284-1827
| +1-800-726-8329 www.samtec.com
-----Original Message-----
From: si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Cheng, Chris
Sent: Wednesday, October 4, 2017 5:37 PM
To: si-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [SI-LIST] Re: Keynote Speeches from EDICon Last month
There are plenty of Nintando64 and PlayStation with RAMBUS to answer
your how practical it is question.
When Bill Gunning and I was working on the first GTL systems, the
target impedance was in the 30's. All the server backplanes I designed
for that workstation company was in that range during that time. Bill
was just borrowing some of his old tricks in designing ECL bus with
lower impedance to minimize heavy loading impact on propagation delay
and impedance mismatch.
Again, I am not here to defend RAMBUS's patent troll practice or lack
of attention to memory latency. But to say the electrical design is
fundamentally flawed does not give justice to many things that came
after it. ALL the AGTL FSB from Intel, DDR1,2,3,4 are double date rate
source synchronous buses.
And even for that memory latency issue has a solution. We had a server
design almost the same as RAMBUS architecture before RAMBUS even exist.
You just have to double your memory and FSB bus width. That's why I
had to pull my hair out to design those crazy 1000+ pins processor
packages in that company. And you see those papers from some members
of Si-list describing how much struggle they had to deal with Swiss
cheesed power planes power delivery and signals routing through
anti-pad gaps. Is it more practical to do that vs. pushing bandwidth
per pin and dropping the bus impedance ?
It's one thing when you are a workstation/server company that ships a
few thousands of processors a year with high margin. You can bury your
package and huge PCB cost for a wide bus in your profit margin.
It's another thing when you are King of processors and ship 100mil+
units a year. At a few cents per pin per package, if you half your bus
width, a few $$ savings times a 100 million is a lot of money. More
than enough to justify even the performance degradation and
engineering resources to make that happen.
I served both masters and they asked me to do drastically different goals.
But I fully understand where they came from. SI exist to make a
particular system architecture works. That is very different from just
making everything as fast as possible with the coolest technology.
And to get back to Scott's original point. If you think something is
not good, do something about it. ServerWorks did and for a while they
cornered the Intel workstation/server chipset market. Before Intel can
react to correct itself, they exited with an 1 billion M&A with
Broadcom. Now that's a cool Unicorn story.
Chris Cheng
Distinguished Technologist , Electrical Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
Company
+1 510 344 4439/ Tel
chris.cheng@xxxxxxx / Email
4209 Technology Dr
Fremont, CA 94538
USA
-----Original Message-----
From: si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Lee Ritchey
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2017 10:34 AM
To: dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; si-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [SI-LIST] Re: Keynote Speeches from EDICon Last month
During the 80s, I ran a design company that was designing PCBs for a
group of engineers at Lawrence Livermore Labs for a super computer for
the US Navy. The team that eventually formed Rambus was on that
project and wanted us to design a transmission line whose impedance
was 28 ohms, not impossible, but not very practical.
The navy cancelled the project and that team went on to form Rambus.
We wondered at the time how practical the idea was. Time showed us.
-----Original Message-----
From: si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of heyfitch (Redacted sender "heyfitch" for DMARC)
Sent: Tuesday, October 3, 2017 2:34 PM
To: si-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [SI-LIST] Re: Keynote Speeches from EDICon Last month
Sent from my phone
On Oct 3, 2017, at 13:47, Lyndell Asbenson
<Lyndell.Asbenson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Chris,
Regarding RAMBUS, it too had a lot of daemons. I have a wonderful
plaque celebrating our achievement in the Intel Chipset 820, and 840.
The 840 was the 1st Intel Workstation utilizing high speed RAMBUS
memory. What we were attempting to do is figure out how to test the
chipsets with RAMBUS interface in very high volume manufacturing. This
brought us fact to face with all kinds of SI challenges we had never
before seen. And had a very short time to figure out. We know we had
to test it at speed, yet there was no production tester fast enough to
do the job. This required a new technology in testing call flyby channel
multiplexing.
Regards,
Lyndell Lee Asbenson
-----Original Message-----
From: si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Cheng, Chris
Sent: Monday, October 2, 2017 11:07 PM
To: si-list@freelists.
Subject: [SI-LIST] Re: Keynote Speeches from EDICon Last month
Funny you mention Merced while Scott was talking about RAMBUS. 460GX
chipset was using PC100 SDRAM, not RAMBUS.
Merced had a lot of daemons, RAMBUS was not one of it.
And I sat through the decision process in the other processor company
when Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim overrule the engineers
recommendation to use RAMBUS.
They correctly realized that bandwidth per pin could not justified the
degraded performance due to increase in memory latency imposed by RAMBUS.
Speed and signal integrity was never a concern and I know both the
engineer responsible to make that happen in RAMBUS and the engineer in
that workstation company tasked to make sure it worked.
RAMBUS exist to address a simple problem at that time, highest
bandwidth per pin for cost sensitive application. And it had plenty of
examples in
Nintando64 and PlayStation. And Intel always had an alternative as
backup, it's called ServerWorks.
Chris Cheng
Distinguished Technologist , Electrical Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
Company
+1 510 344 4439/ Tel
chris.cheng@xxxxxxx / Email
4209 Technology Dr
Fremont, CA 94538
USA
-----Original Message-----
From: si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On
Behalf Of Lee Ritchey
Sent: Monday, October 02, 2017 11:40 AM
To: Scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; si-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [SI-LIST] Re: Keynote Speeches from EDICon Last month
Scott,
Almost makes me want to go out and become an engineer! Nice work!
Didn't know you lived through the Intel Merced disaster! Only time I
ever heard a CEO admit publicly that Intel had made that mistake.
Craig Barret did that.
I watched the Apollo landing because I had a radio on board. That design
was my first job out of college. Couldn't believe they gave such
important
jobs to beginners! But, then, everyone on that project was a beginner at
designing those things!
Lee
-----Original Message-----
From: si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:si-list-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On
Behalf Of Scott McMorrow
Sent: Monday, October 2, 2017 10:02 AM
To: si-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [SI-LIST] Keynote Speeches from EDICon Last month
https://www.signalintegrityjournal.com/articles/567-edi-con-usa-keynot
e-
talk
s---bet-your-job-5g-in-5-years-and-tm-value
Scott McMorrow, CTO Signal Integrity Group Samtec Office 401-284-1827
|
+1-800-726-8329 www.samtec.com<http://www.samtec.com/>
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