Vote for the 2006 Test Engineer of the Year
Our editors have selected six nominees for this annual award. Now, it’s your turn to choose the winner.
By Staff -- Test & Measurement World, 9/1/2005 2:00:00 AM
Name a successful electronics component, system, or end product, and you'll likely find one common ingredient: quality. And more than any other technical professional, the test engineer is responsible for ensuring a product's quality—all the way through from design to production to field service.
To salute the essential role that the test engineer's ingenuity and hard work play in reliable, safe, and affordable products, Test & Measurement World announces its third annual Test Engineer of the Year competition. Thanks to the generosity of National Instruments, the winning candidate will designate a $20,000 donation to an engineering school. "This award not only recognizes an outstanding engineer for his or her innovative work, but it is a way to help future engineers through an educational grant," commented James Truchard, CEO of National Instruments.
| Go to the Ballot for the 2006 Test Engineer of the Year |
| Read other September 2005 articles |
Test & Measurement World will present the 2006 Test Engineer of the Year award at our "Best in Test" gala during the 2006 APEX Show (February 8–10, 2006, Anaheim, CA). In addition, the cover story of our March 2006 issue will profile the winning engineer.
In recent months, we've received many nominations of pacesetting test engineers from a range of test fields. Our editors have selected six individuals as the finalists for the award. Please review their profiles both for their special on-the-job skills as well as their overall contributions to the test field and the industries they serve. Then, cast your vote using our online ballot.
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Zafer Boz
STMicroelectronics
It's tough enough for an immigrant to adjust to life in a new country; it may even be more daunting to win the recognition of peers on an engineering team of a global semiconductor giant. But Zafer Boz, a Turkish national who earned his EE degree from the University of Ankara, has met those challenges.
Using such tools as LabWindows/CVI and C++, Boz developed a new software suite for his engineering colleagues at ST's Reading, England, business unit, which makes chipsets for wireless LAN applications. Called STE (ST Test Executive), the software can be easily reconfigured to handle a number of different applications—functional tests, debugging, soak testing, calibration, and production test. "I wanted our engineers to be able to focus on their test work, rather than compiling code," said Boz.
The software is getting rave reviews from ST engineers in the UK and France, as well as from contractors in the US that are doing work for ST's UK business unit. While STE remains an internal tool, Boz would like to patent it for wider use. Meanwhile, he is working on his master's degree in electrical engineering, and he hopes to build a career in managing automated test projects. Read more about Zafer Boz.
TEST DATA MANAGEMENT
John Kauffman
Rockwell Collins
Thanks to the work of manufacturing electrical engineer John Kauffman, Rockwell Collins has taken a giant step in trimming labor, service, and warranty costs on products it builds for the military's Joint Tactical Radio System. The 20-year test veteran has fashioned a data-management system that both streamlines the test flow for this important product line during manufacturing and tracks the tests performed on the equipment throughout the product life cycle. In this system, data from field tests is uplinked to a central data base. This enables test and development teams to spot defect patterns earlier and, if needed, make essential design changes. "It allows us to be proactive, rather than reactive," said Kauffman, who adds that other product lines at Collins are also adopting the system.
The biggest challenge in setting up the system was gaining the consensus of design, test, and quality engineers in a large organization. But that is nothing new for Kauffman, who spent 15 years in the Marines, where he served as West Coast coordinator of metrology services, a task that involved calibrating some 4000 avionics devices. That experience taught him the value of sharing technical ideas among engineers from government, military contractors, and test-equipment vendors. Read more about John Kauffman.
THERMAL MANAGEMENT
Herman Chu
Cisco Systems
Power-hungry electronic devices create a lot of cooling problems, which is why Herman Chu has been so valuable to blue-chip companies like General Dynamics, Amdahl, Hewlett-Packard, and Cisco. Over a 20-year career devoted exclusively to tackling difficult thermal-management challenges, Chu's talents in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis, design of experiments, and test procedures have delivered cooling solutions on products as varied as F-16 fighters, mainframe computers, and network systems.
Over the years, Chu has set up thermal-engineering labs at several locations, including a new facility at Cisco for cooling high-power network routers. In that work, he is setting up system-level testing for flow visualization, IR imaging, airflow impedance, and thermal characterization. Chu is most proud of innovative methods that he has developed to measure CPU case temperature, which have wide industry applications. Also significant: a new Cisco project to design a thermal tester for measuring different classes of thermal-interface materials.
On an industry level, Chu, who holds a master's in thermal systems design, has written papers and chaired several workshops for the International Microelectronics Packaging Society. As a personal crusade, he calls for more creative solutions in design and software for stemming the ever-increasing power consumption of electronic devices. Read more about Herman Chu.
METROLOGY
Georgia Harris
National Institute of Standards and Technology
If you doubt the importance of accurate metrology, consider this: Half of this country's gross domestic product is bought or sold on the basis of weights and measures. As leader of the Metrology Group in the Weights and Measures division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Georgia Harris oversees the accreditation program for more than 50 state laboratories engaged in about 350,000 calibrations annually. During her 15 years at NIST, Harris has spearheaded numerous quality programs for calibration labs, instituted metrology training programs for government and industry personnel, and established proficiency tests for metrologists.
A physical scientist with a master's in technical management from Johns Hopkins, Harris makes it a priority to identify the long-term needs of metrology. She has authored many papers, collaborated with government and industry professionals worldwide, and helped shape many standards on weights and measures. Noting that her "real passion" is education, Harris worries that too few engineers are choosing metrology as a career—a concern she now addresses as the education and training director for the National Conference of Standards Laboratories. After a six-month sabbatical to hike the Appalachian Trail, Harris plans to pursue a PhD in leadership and organizational development, while continuing with NIST. Read more about Georgia Harris.
FUNCTIONAL TEST
Michael Freeman
Broadcom
Engineers in the fast-paced communications market know that cutting time-to-market is vital. That's why Michael Freeman is such a key player on an R&D team that develops chipsets for broadband applications. The veteran test engineer has created and deployed a whole series of custom automated test systems—both hardware and software—for evaluating such products as complete cable modems on a chip.
Among the testers he has designed is a downstream impairment test system that stresses RF tuners with a mixture of analog, QAM, and wideband noise to simulate worst-case CATV plant conditions. Freeman is particularly proud of a custom system he designed to test the interoperability of cable modems, wireless cable routers, and related products. This tester helps Broadcom and its customers prepare products for required industry certification. His latest challenge: testing embedded multimedia terminal adapters for the burgeoning voice-over cable market.
Earlier in his career, Freeman developed extensive skills in environmental testing on defense systems. He has authored several technical papers on topics ranging from modular test to Visual Basic programming, and he has written a book on shock and vibration testing. Freeman serves as the president of the Atlanta chapter of the American Society of Test Engineers and maintains the ASTE's Web site. Read more about Michael Freeman.
CONSUMER ELECTRONICS TEST
Ed Coleman
Lexmark International
In the highly competitive inkjet printer market, test engineers can't afford to rest on their laurels. New designs are constantly coming on stream, and new tests must be devised under tight deadlines. At Lexmark, Ed Coleman employs the latest 100-MHz digital I/O cards and 100-MHz oscilloscope cards to test inkjet print heads. When a prototype inkjet print head chip arrives on a wafer, Coleman must write the initial software to electrically test and address the nozzle heads. He also works with material-handling vendors to incorporate electrical tests for print heads into automated manufacturing lines in Mexico, Scotland, and the Philippines. And when a manufacturing tester goes down at a Lexmark facility anywhere in the world, Coleman frequently gets the call to solve the crisis.
In nearly three decades of engineering work, Coleman has tackled many projects in development, test, and manufacturing. While at IBM, he received patents on the buckling spring keyboard, which Big Blue manufactured at the rate of more than 3 million annually in the late 1980s. He also developed the software to control production-line robots used for force displacement measurements on keyboards. In addition, Coleman served on a major industry committee to address concerns over carpal tunnel syndrome in office workers. Read more about Ed Coleman.
Go to the Ballot for the 2006 Test Engineer of the Year
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