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#452 – An Interview with Kieran O’Leary
Welcome Kieran O’Leary, principal of Mixed Signal Systems!
- Chris knows Kieran via the consulting forum. You can apply to join here.
- Went to school in Cork, Ireland
- Hard IP inside of FPGAs started on the Virtex2 pro
- Now they’re doing FPGA next to RF sections (which from a noise perspective is crazy)
- FAEs vs AEs
- “Applications engineers are responsible for shepherding the design from development into the customers hands”
- AEs understand the need for trust with a customer
- Kieran has worked at Xilinx, ADI and Wolfson
- “If your client is pushing through a million units a week, it’s a statistical certainty that any problem in the silicon is going to surface”
- Sometimes you don’t want the cutting edge silicon
- “You want to be on the leading edge but not on the bleeding edge”
- Making eval and dev kits at chip companies
- Was it more about making a breakout board? Or something interesting?
- Walking through silicon coming from the fab
- Hand carrying the silicon back from the packaging facility
- Pinouts move sometimes!
- Custom sockets are expensive to make.
- THD measurements might look poor if the connection between the socket and the device look bad
- Boards for the general public need better supporting collateral
- In 2012, Kieran decided to move into consulting
- He often helps clean up technical debt on the hardware side of things
- Things to watch out for in Signal Integrity
- “Current flows in loops, either you or Maxwell will determine the return path”
- Dr Howard Johnson on The Amp Hour
- Split ground planes
- “There’s nothing foolproof to a sufficiently proficient fool”
- Troubleshooting EMC problems
- Check the values on the schematic
- Take a nearfield probe and see what you see
- Look for common culprits
- See where signals are jumping over a split plane
- Termination resistors in the wrong place
- Helps to add placeholders for future filters and termination
- Maxwell was Scotish, so there is a statue commemorating him. There is a Maxwell museum, as well!
- Follow Kieran on Twitter!
- His company Mixed Signal Systems is also on there.
- Kieran helped run the EMC Compo 2015 – The 10th International Workshop on the EMC of Integrated Circuits
- 12th int’l is coming up in China