Lee Ritchey On the Future of PCB Design

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

Matties: Well those two are enough, I get the idea (laughs).

Ritchey: Bob Noyce offered me 10,000 shares of founders stock to be his first test engineering manager.

Matties: Why'd you turn it down?

Ritchey: Well, at the time CMOS was very difficult to make work. It was really slow.

Matties: You felt there was an alternative path?

Ritchey: We were building stuff out of ECL. ECL was the hot, fast stuff, but now CMOS is 10 times faster than ECL. Where we could've never made a 15 peak per second rise time with ECL, we have those for CMOS right now.

Matties: Let's move on to designers. People were asking you what advice you would give to young designers. What would you tell them?

Ritchey: I know because of the speed that things are going and how we're going up the speed curve that every board designer is going to have to deal with five or 10 gigabits per second, and you can't do that if you don't understand how fields and waves work. All those guys need to get on top of that, partly so that they don't get misled by people who are not telling them the right thing.

Matties: And there's a lot of that in the industry, isn't there?

Ritchey: Most of it is.

Matties: One of the questions that was posed in your keynote was about the difference between digital and analog and your response was...

Ritchey: It's all analog.

Matties: Why is that a mystery or even a question to people? What's the mindset that would make them think that?

Ritchey: Here's a bit of history. When we got CMOS to run fast enough to do decent computing, the whole industry rewarded computer science majors. Namely, these were the people who write code, because it didn't much matter how you hooked the parts up. So that got only TTL or whatever, and now we have a whole population of engineers who are good computer scientists who now must cope with the fact that there are fields and waves and they don't know what they are. I spend most of my time on that, because when things were slow we could be sloppy. We didn't spend any time on signal integrity. It all was code, and then the hard part of that is now all the senior management are these computer scientists who don't understand any of it and won't support their engineers to get tools or training, and the companies that don't get that are going away.

But we rewarded 30 years of computer science majors at the expense of real electrical engineering. You can get an electrical engineering degree at my university, Cal State University at Sacramento, without ever taking a fields and waves course, which was the most fundamental course in electrical engineering. How is that possible? What happened was, when the focus came to computer science, you can only have so many units per semester, so which course would you toss out? And that one got made an elective. It shouldn't have been, but it got made an elective.

Matties: Is there a shift going on now where we're seeing that coming back as a requirement, as a fundamental?

Ritchey: Yeah, in fact I'm spending probably one day a month at my university getting the professors up to speed. They don't know fields and waves.

Matties: Someone's got to teach them, right? Well, they had no need to know.

Ritchey: No, and so we are having to put that back in the curriculum.

Matties: How is it going teaching your professors? Are they receptive?

Ritchey: Oh, yeah. They want to teach the right stuff. The biggest problem, and it's not just my university, it's all universities: They have no contact with the real world. The students don't have anything practical when they leave.

Matties: Why is that?

Ritchey: Well, because almost all professors go from being a PhD student to an instructor without ever going out in the field.

Matties: It seems to me there is a large population like yourself, who have the knowledge and real-world experience, who could go back in and do more of what you're doing.

Ritchey: That's what I'm doing is taking it back, but the best schools are the ones that have work study programs. Because then the students get to go out in the real world. The other thing about universities is text books and professors are always 10 years behind the industry.

Matties: Aren’t we seeing more major companies creating their own universities, if you will?

Ritchey: Yes, Qualcomm has a huge one.

Matties: Doesn't that make more sense than going through the traditional path?

Ritchey: They're doing that out of necessity. They would rather not, but the universities still have not got it right. I don't think they will. Qualcomm has a university, Cisco has a university, and IBM always had one.

Matties: Are they teaching the right things?

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