The Amp Hour

An Interview with Kieran O'Leary

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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
    1. Check the values on the schematic
    2. Take a nearfield probe and see what you see
    3. Look for common culprits
      1. See where signals are jumping over a split plane
      2. Termination resistors in the wrong place
      3.  Helps to add placeholders for future filters and termination
      4. Maxwell was Scotish, so there is a statue commemorating him. There is a Maxwell museum, as well!
      5. Follow Kieran on Twitter!
      6. His company Mixed Signal Systems is also on there.
      7. Kieran helped run the EMC Compo 2015 - The 10th International Workshop on the EMC of Integrated Circuits
      8. 12th int'l is coming up in China
        9. ...more
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        The Amp HourBy The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)
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