#452 – 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
•  Helps to add placeholders for future filters and termination
• Maxwell was Scotish, so there is a statue commemorating him. There is a Maxwell museum, as well!
• Follow Kieran on Twitter!
• His company Mixed Signal Systems is also on there.
• Kieran helped run the EMC Compo 2015 – The 10th International Workshop on the EMC of Integrated Circuits
• 12th int’l is coming up in China