September 23, 2019

An Interview with Tom Lee

1 hour 14 minutes

Welcome Dr Thomas (Tom) Lee of the Microwave Integrated Circuits Lab (SMIrC) at Stanford University!

This episode is sponsored by Rohde and Schwarz. Check out AskAnEngineer.us for more info about their value line test equipment.

Tom is friends with two past guests, Jeri Ellsworth and Kent Lundberg

Tom owns a LOT of scopes (200 or so)

First scope was a Heathkit

The Tek 485 had nice user design

"I didn't like an intermediate layer."

John Addis and Wink Gross designed the important parts of the 485

The 485 added a superfast square wave to the front panel important for calibrating a 350 MHz scope

Protection circuits

Tom got started in electronics fixing TVs

He then went to work for the founders of Wavetek (but not directly for the company) with people like Joe Deavenport

Tom went to MIT and worked under Jim Roberge (check out the video series where Jim is lecturing on-camera)

He proposed a thesis that was the world's first integrated CMOS radio

Marvin Minsky

"The thesis doesn't change the world...it changes you"

CMOS was considered crap, was mostly used for wristwatches and calculators

Other types of MOS and BJT circuits were considered to be much better.

Tom used MOSIS, the IC bundling service mentioned on this program before.

Didn't have PDKs

Magic from Berkeley allowed Tom to see the DRC errors as they happened.

He ended up building an FM radio...without any inductors!

Made gyrators into inductors

Moved to Analog Devices where he learned a lot from Barrie Gilbert and Paul Brokaw

Moving back to California and went to work for a startup RAMBUS

Stanford wanted someone to do RF and give a first class on RF chip design

Tom started in 1994 and started the first microwave IC lab.

Tom and his grad students created the first GPS CMOS receiver

Used to be 1 GHz and above is microwave

Many of Tom's students are (truly) seeing Maxwell's equations for real for the first time

What are the mental models?

Tom said he "inflicts history on students". This is also in the early chapters of Tom's book, Planar Microwave Engineering

Maxwell didn't use vector calculus, he used quaternian form.

Every course Tom teaches has a lab, including his undergrad lab which involves copper tape and making a radio.

A lot of faculty have never built stuff

He is now working with students on mmwave and 5G (because that's where a lot of the research dollars are right now)

Beamforming to get aggregate bandwidth

Printed electronics for power delivery, serving devices that are in the mW level not the W level

Feature sizes of CMOS

Tom is on the board of Xilinx

Tom is taking a year sabbatical and working on a book about instrumentation

He hopes to ask many of the creators about the secrets inside the test equipment he often is reverse engineering

Jim Williams told him to buy a rubidium clock (standard) at a flea market.

Worked at DARPA, where his office funded development of a chip scale atomic clock

That chip subsequently released a bit of smoke in the space station...

Read more about Tom's research on his group's website

...more

View all episodes

By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

4.9

226226 ratings

September 23, 2019

An Interview with Tom Lee

1 hour 14 minutes

Welcome Dr Thomas (Tom) Lee of the Microwave Integrated Circuits Lab (SMIrC) at Stanford University!

This episode is sponsored by Rohde and Schwarz. Check out AskAnEngineer.us for more info about their value line test equipment.

Tom is friends with two past guests, Jeri Ellsworth and Kent Lundberg

Tom owns a LOT of scopes (200 or so)

First scope was a Heathkit

The Tek 485 had nice user design

"I didn't like an intermediate layer."

John Addis and Wink Gross designed the important parts of the 485

The 485 added a superfast square wave to the front panel important for calibrating a 350 MHz scope

Protection circuits

Tom got started in electronics fixing TVs

He then went to work for the founders of Wavetek (but not directly for the company) with people like Joe Deavenport

Tom went to MIT and worked under Jim Roberge (check out the video series where Jim is lecturing on-camera)

He proposed a thesis that was the world's first integrated CMOS radio

Marvin Minsky

"The thesis doesn't change the world...it changes you"

CMOS was considered crap, was mostly used for wristwatches and calculators

Other types of MOS and BJT circuits were considered to be much better.

Tom used MOSIS, the IC bundling service mentioned on this program before.

Didn't have PDKs

Magic from Berkeley allowed Tom to see the DRC errors as they happened.

He ended up building an FM radio...without any inductors!

Made gyrators into inductors

Moved to Analog Devices where he learned a lot from Barrie Gilbert and Paul Brokaw

Moving back to California and went to work for a startup RAMBUS

Stanford wanted someone to do RF and give a first class on RF chip design

Tom started in 1994 and started the first microwave IC lab.

Tom and his grad students created the first GPS CMOS receiver

Used to be 1 GHz and above is microwave

Many of Tom's students are (truly) seeing Maxwell's equations for real for the first time

What are the mental models?

Tom said he "inflicts history on students". This is also in the early chapters of Tom's book, Planar Microwave Engineering

Maxwell didn't use vector calculus, he used quaternian form.

Every course Tom teaches has a lab, including his undergrad lab which involves copper tape and making a radio.

A lot of faculty have never built stuff

He is now working with students on mmwave and 5G (because that's where a lot of the research dollars are right now)

Beamforming to get aggregate bandwidth

Printed electronics for power delivery, serving devices that are in the mW level not the W level

Feature sizes of CMOS

Tom is on the board of Xilinx

Tom is taking a year sabbatical and working on a book about instrumentation

He hopes to ask many of the creators about the secrets inside the test equipment he often is reverse engineering

Jim Williams told him to buy a rubidium clock (standard) at a flea market.

Worked at DARPA, where his office funded development of a chip scale atomic clock

That chip subsequently released a bit of smoke in the space station...

Read more about Tom's research on his group's website

...more

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An Interview with Tom Lee

An Interview with Tom Lee

More shows like The Amp Hour

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This Week in Tech (Audio)

Security Now (Audio)

Software Engineering Daily

Talk Python To Me

SpyCast

SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Cyber Security Podcast (Stormcast)

Embedded

Smashing Security

Darknet Diaries

Physics World Weekly Podcast

Practical AI

Hackaday Podcast

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

Robinson's Podcast