Title: Dark Secrets of the Instrumentation Wizards

Speaker: Prof. Thomas Lee, Stanford University

Time & Date: 10:30 – 11:30, September 17, Monday

Venue: Governing Board Meeting Room, Dao Yuan Building

Abstract:
Instrumentation engineers have to provide tomorrow's performance using today's technology. That extreme pressure has stimulated remarkable innovation that is little known outside of a small community even today. How did Tektronix build oscilloscopes with triple the bandwidth of their competitors? What did 1930s Shanghai have to do with the achievement, and can 21st-century electronics benefit from such "old" ideas? How did Hewlett-Packard produce signal generators with 20dB lower distortion and phase noise than anyone else? What critical design flaw lay hidden in Hewlett's famous Wien-bridge oscillator for 20 years, and what lessons does his mistake hold for modern oscillator designers?

This talk will answer these and other questions in the process of studying several representative classic instruments.

Biography:

Thomas Lee received his degrees from MIT, where his 1989 thesis described the world's first CMOS radio. He has been at Stanford since 1994, having previously worked at Analog Devices, Rambus and other companies. He has helped design PLLs for several microprocessors (notably AMD's K6-K7-K8 and DEC's StrongARM), and has founded or cofounded several companies, including the first 3D memory company, Matrix Semiconductor (acquired by Sandisk), and IoE companies ZeroG Wireless (acquired by Microchip) and Ayla Networks. He is an IEEE and Packard Foundation Fellow, has won "Best Paper" awards at CICC and ISSCC, was awarded the 2011 Ho-Am Prize in Engineering and an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo. He is on the board of Xilinx, holds ~60 patents, and authored several textbooks. He owns 150-200 oscilloscopes, thousands of vacuum tubes, and kilograms many of obsolete semiconductors. No one, including himself, quite knows why.