Breaking My Own Rules With Shameless Plugs

 





Christopher F. Marki received his B.S.E.E. from Duke University in 2002 and his M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego in 2004 and 2007, respectively. While in graduate school, Christopher studied high speed fiber optics and consulted for San Diego start-up Ziva Corporation. Following graduate school, Christopher decided to forego a life in Photonics and opted, instead, to work with his father at Marki Microwave and learn the “family business” of microwave mixers. While at Marki Microwave, Christopher has served as Director of Research and has been responsible for the design and commercialization of many of Marki’s fastest growing product lines including filters, couplers and power dividers. Dr. Marki has authored and co-authored numerous journal and conference publications and frequently serves as an IEEE reviewer for Photonics Technology Letters and Journal of Lightwave Technology.   MarkiMicrowave.com

To comment or ask Christopher a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

 

July 27, 2010

 

    When people ask my advice about pursuing a career in Engineering, I tell them the following:

If you can go 30 days of the month without good news or good results, only to find on the 31^st day that your project works perfectly, and this good news puts you in such a euphoric mood that you can forget about all the previous frustrations, then you are going to be a great engineer. If that sense of personal accomplishment isn’t good enough to make you happy, then you should consider doing something else.

Today is the 31^st day of my month, and I am happy to share with you some good news, both about some of our newest products, and about the fact that Marki Microwave is looking to hire some ambitious and talented new employees. (I promised myself I wouldn’t use this blog as a platform to advertise Marki Microwave explicitly, but sometimes I just want to talk about some of our newest designs, especially when they’ve been in the development pipeline for so long.)

 For quite some time, I have been trying design Wilkinson power dividers with (nearly) unlimited bandwidth. I didn’t really have a customer requirement forcing me to do so, but I was looking for a complementary power divider line to our popular broadband directional couplers and 3 dB quadrature hybrids. The challenge has always been twofold: I wanted to avoid using multi-layer stripline geometries to make the power dividers, and I wanted a way to make them work well beyond 26 GHz. Avoiding stripline would make the part cheaper to build by reducing complexity and assembly time, and making power dividers above 26 GHz would enable me to meet higher frequency requirements to 65 GHz.

I am happy to announce that after our metaphorical 30 days of hardship in lab and 3D computer simulation, we now have a design technique that enables us to build power dividers from below 400 MHz to 65 GHz. These new power dividers are based on a novel approach to making Wilkinson power dividers that eliminates the costly stripline assembly while also minimizing the deleterious effects of line discontinuities in conventional multi-section Wilkinson designs. The first released power dividers using this new construction offer bandwidth ratios of approximately 40:1 including the PD-0R413 (400 MHz to 13 GHz), the PD-0R618 (600 MHz to 18 GHz) and the PD-0140 (1 GHz to 40 GHz).  Typical isolations exceed 20 dB with outstanding amplitude and phase balance. It is important to point out that these designs are totally symmetric between the output ports meaning that the overall balance of the circuits is superior to other vendors’ solutions that employ asymmetries which severely limit the performance at higher frequencies. In the coming weeks, we will be announcing additional power dividers which can cover 65:1 bandwidth. If you would like to be kept up to speed on these and related product releases, please sign up for Marki Microwave’s monthly newsletter by clicking here.

As I mentioned above, I am also excited to announce that Marki Microwave is hiring. We are currently looking to fill an opening for a Technical Marketing Engineer. This role requires someone with some engineering background but wants also can excel in a Sales/Marketing position. If you, or someone you know has this skill set and is looking for employment, please send a resume to [email protected]. 

“Datasheet” is a bad word

 





Christopher F. Marki received his B.S.E.E. from Duke University in 2002 and his M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego in 2004 and 2007, respectively. While in graduate school, Christopher studied high speed fiber optics and consulted for San Diego start-up Ziva Corporation. Following graduate school, Christopher decided to forego a life in Photonics and opted, instead, to work with his father at Marki Microwave and learn the “family business” of microwave mixers. While at Marki Microwave, Christopher has served as Director of Research and has been responsible for the design and commercialization of many of Marki’s fastest growing product lines including filters, couplers and power dividers. Dr. Marki has authored and co-authored numerous journal and conference publications and frequently serves as an IEEE reviewer for Photonics Technology Letters and Journal of Lightwave Technology.   MarkiMicrowave.com

To comment or ask Christopher a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

 

July 15, 2010

 

After the long and sometimes strenuous journey one takes in the product development cycle, the inevitable final stage can be the most challenging: the making of the datasheet. 

    As an engineer, I dislike making datasheets. I loathe the idea that I am required to summarize the macroscopic workings of my “babies” (i.e. new products) with bold, unforgiving numbers that can never fully represent the “inner beauty” of the product. For me, the datasheet is a wholly inadequate creature that almost always fails to capture the many nuances of the product. Seriously, am I expected to describe all the workings of my new products in a few tables and graphs in .pdf format? Unfortunately, yes. So it looks like I’ll just have to accept the truth and adapt accordingly.

    Complaints aside, datasheets cannot be underestimated in their importance. When I put on my Marketing Hat (I wear many hats at Marki Microwave, it goes with the territory), I am forced to acknowledge that datasheets are the all-important first impression; they are the lens through which my company and product lines are initially judged. Therefore, we place much emphasis on making our datasheets as clean and precise as possible. Through my experiences with using other vendor’s datasheets and in creating my own, I have formed some opinions about the “correct” way of making, displaying, and using datasheets. I concede this is a subjective area, so I’ll try to be as objective as possible.

1.    Minimum and Maximum specs are guarantees, Typical specs are not. For vendors, the delta between Min/Max and Typical is our breathing room. At Marki Microwave, we use typical specs to describe the average performance of the part across the band. Therefore, if the Conversion Loss of the mixer is 7 dB (typ.), then that is about what the measured value will be on most units, over most of the band. That doesn’t guarantee the number won’t be 7.5 dB near the band edge, just that the statistical average is close to 7 dB. Choosing Min/Max/Typ is not a perfect science, but honest vendors work extremely hard to identify these values as accurately as humanly possible, trust me. Moreover, most vendors will even do a few extra measurements for you, you just have to ask nicely. Remember, measurements = reality, datasheets = quasi-reality. (The caveat, of course, is that I am assuming the measurement is performed correctly, but that is a different topic for a different time). 

2.    Product tables are not datasheets. Some vendors do not make datasheets available on their websites, only product tables. These tables display key information (insertion loss, return loss, etc), but not in any detailed format that is quickly confirmed with included measurement data. As a designer looking for a product, I dislike product tables for two reasons: the numbers are too ambiguous, and they make me think the vendor is hiding something. When it comes to product performance, I like to see curves and graphs. For example, if an amp has 15 dB gain, I want to see how that gain changes with frequency. This information can be critical to my application. More importantly, when it comes to choosing parts for my designs, I tend to feel very skeptical of vendors that only provide me with tables of numbers and no actual measured plots—it makes me worry that the vendor is hiding some kind of flaw or glaring weakness. I have actually heard rumors that there exist companies, past and present, that “create” new products simply by adding new rows to their product tables without ever having built the widget. Such horror stories always leave me with a sense of caution when choosing my suppliers. From a marketing point of view, the solution is obvious: be as transparent as possible and provide as much information as possible. This will yield brand loyalty and help to make your customers successful, my main priority.

3.    Never require a customer to “sign in” or provide personal information in order to download a datasheet. If you are going to announce to the world that your company offers a certain product, don’t pull a bait-and-switch by subsequently forcing me to give you my email address. It can be optional, but please don’t require it! There are certain companies and product areas where this is common practice, and it always leaves me frustrated (as an engineer and potential customer) and dumbfounded (as a Sales/Marketing person). This is the era of Google, YouTube, HD On Demand, and Wikipedia. Modern culture demands that information be freely disseminated without someone having to remember their password. Therefore, why hide your datasheet? I understand the argument (security, competitive advantage, marketing information, etc), but frankly, I think it is difficult to justify because it leaves customers with memories of a negative website experience…problem. Plus, your competitor might be willing to give out datasheets without the hassle…bigger problem.

These are just a few rules of thumb I try to follow when it comes to datasheets and website maintenance.  If you have any suggestions or want to share your own opinions and experiences about the world of spec’ing and datasheets, I’d love to hear them.

.

A Technologists Guide to the World Cup

 





Christopher F. Marki received his B.S.E.E. from Duke University in 2002 and his M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego in 2004 and 2007, respectively. While in graduate school, Christopher studied high speed fiber optics and consulted for San Diego start-up Ziva Corporation. Following graduate school, Christopher decided to forego a life in Photonics and opted, instead, to work with his father at Marki Microwave and learn the “family business” of microwave mixers. While at Marki Microwave, Christopher has served as Director of Research and has been responsible for the design and commercialization of many of Marki’s fastest growing product lines including filters, couplers and power dividers. Dr. Marki has authored and co-authored numerous journal and conference publications and frequently serves as an IEEE reviewer for Photonics Technology Letters and Journal of Lightwave Technology.   MarkiMicrowave.com

To comment or ask Christopher a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

 

July 2, 2010

 

I love soccer (i.e. football for my international readers). I grew up playing the sport and consider it one the most character-defining experiences of my life. For me, the World Cup is the greatest sporting competition around. Now that I am in the technology area, I am dumbfounded at FIFA’s insistence on ignoring modern technology to improve the officiating. Just like the rest of the world population, I find FIFA’s stoicism ridiculous and alarming when the fate of entire nations (and millions of dollars) rests in the hands of one or two terrible refereeing mistakes (hello England vs. Germany, U.S. vs. Slovenia, Mexico vs. Argentina, etc).

 

With Sepp Blatter’s recent announcement that FIFA will “re-evaluate” the use of goal line technology, I have started to imagine how technology could transform the officiating of the world’s game. I am no futurist, but this thought experiment provokes some interesting questions as to what is currently feasible with modern technology, and what still requires some R&D.  The following analysis follows similar guidelines to the way I evaluate new product development and directions at Marki Microwave.

As one might expect, the low-difficulty, low cost solutions are the areas that FIFA should adopt first. The blue-sky areas (high difficulty, high cost) might never be considered for any sport, but are interesting talking points that would make any Venture Capitalist salivate.

 

Sideline/Goal-line Technology

Difficulty: High School Science Fair

Cost: Minimal

Technological Requirements: This is a no-brainer. All you need is an array of cameras, some image recognition software that already exists (such as the Hawk-Eye system in Tennis), maybe a few RFID tags embedded in the ball, and a big red light that flashes when the ball cross the line (like in my other favorite sport, Hockey). The fact that these technologies already exist in other sports but have been stubbornly ignored by FIFA has nothing to do with science, I’ll let the bureaucrats fight this one out. 

 

Automatic Offsides

Difficulty: Undergraduate Research Project

Cost: Minimal

Technological Requirements: I would love to see this employed. It seems that as long as there are a few cameras at high enough angles in the stadium, real time software can easily determine the position of the forward most attacking player at the instant the ball is played. Amazingly, TV broadcasters are already using a variant of this technology (albeit after-the-fact) to determine whether the call was correct or not. If we really wanted to get elaborate, we could use an antenna array and RFID chips to triangulate the exact position of the ball and players. We could then place an accelerometer in the ball to determine the exact moment the ball is played. All of these technologies would be synced to some kind of central processor that could easily determine if the player was offside or not at the exact moment of impact. This can be done with off-the-shelf products (I’m guessing for less than the cost of a plane flight to South Aftica). If I were a college professor, I would make this a senior design project for my students.

 

Diving Detection

Difficulty: PHD Dissertation

Cost: Moderate

Technological Requirements: For me, the most unappealing aspects of soccer are diving and injury faking. Compared to other sports like Hockey, where diving is rare and playing through injury is commonplace, soccer is full of primadonna stars that don’t like to get their shirts dirty (did someone say Cristiano Ronaldo?).  Nothing makes me happier than when a player is carded for diving in the penalty box. It appeals to my sense of justice.

 

    How can technology be used to clean up the game? This is a difficult question because computers are not good at subjective decision making. In many cases, diving does involve some amount of contact with a defender. Therefore, a first requirement is that we would need a good array of cameras to follow the play from multiple angles to determine how much contact is made. We could then use some kind of  physics modeling engine (like those used in video games) to predict reasonable outcomes from the contact. In the cases where totally unreasonable outcomes occur (like when a player clearly dives without being touched), the computer could notify the referee that an unpredicted or unreasonable result occurred based on the forces involved in the tackle.

 

The hardest part, however, is that diving is often contextual. Players tend to dive in certain parts of the field, and some do it more than others. We then require that the software learn to incorporate some kind of learning algorithm such that it can develop a “soccer sense”. For example, we know that Cristiano Ronaldo is likely to dive when he dribbles straight into 3 defenders. Programming soccer sense would be one of the most difficult problems for computer scientists. Conveniently, governments, corporations and universities are interested in this kind of computer learning and decision making because we increasingly rely on software to predict our moods and behavior given a set of initial conditions. The ability to “train” computers to understand and interpret human behavior is incredibly important for many fields including Marketing, Security and Investing, so I’d imagine one can extend it to Sport.

 

Human-less Officiating

Difficulty: Manhattan Project

Cost: Millions in Venture Capital

Technological Requirements: Given enough resources and the right collection of experts in computer science, robotics and networking, this might be possible in a few years. It all comes down to the software’s soccer sense algorithm. A human referee must account for many conflicting variables during a game: score, time left, emotional state of the players. It is the nuances of the game that make it so entertaining. Sometimes the correct decision is to allow the game to be more physical, sometimes not. Sometimes a card is warranted, sometimes not. The decision making is contextual, I suspect this would be difficult to teach to a computer without significant R&D. But, it is not impossible. It would just take lots of patience and even more calibrating and tweaking. For all we know, someone at Google or IBM is already doing this…

It looks like the goal line technology is quickly on its way to adoption based on public outcry. However, I don’t see FIFA making any other changes any time soon. As a fan and technologist, I just want to see an equitably called game free from referee tampering. The U.S. was admittedly lucky to not be haunted by the mystery Slovenia call thanks to Landon Donovan’s injury time heroics against Algeria. Unfortunately, the English and the Mexicans can’t say the same.