Race quickens on scope performance (continued)
A continuation of our interview with Thomas Reslewic, President and CEO of LeCroy, which appeared in the April 2009 Viewpoint column.
Larry Maloney, Contributing Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 4/1/2009 2:00:00 AM
 Thomas H. Reslewic President and CEO LeCroy Chestnut Ridge, NY Thomas H. Reslewic has served as president and CEO of LeCroy since January 2002, when he was also named to the company’s board of directors. Joining LeCroy in 1990, Reslewic previously served the company as executive VP and COO. From 1993 to 1998, he held key sales and marketing functions, helping to increase oscilloscope revenues from $43 million to $105 million. Prior to his tenure at LeCroy, Reslewic spent eight years in sales and marketing management with another leading oscilloscope manufacturer. Reslewic earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the College of the Holy Cross and an MBA from the University of Oregon. Contributing editor Larry Maloney conducted a phone interview with Reslewic on the performance challenges facing vendors of high-end test and measurement devices. Read the first part of this interview. |
Q: So data storage has become a big technology driver?
A: There’s no question. We are all uploading and downloading more data, photos, videos, and applications that all require huge amounts of data storage. And, of course, the next trend in all this will be the development of solid-state storage, replacing the mechanical disk drive. It’s cheaper, faster, and consumes less power—all very critical advantages in products like notebook computers. So, there’s virtually no end in sight for gains in serial-data standards. What that means is that oscilloscopes with 13- to 15-GHz bandwidths, while adequate for 5- to 6-Gbps transfer rates, won’t be sufficient for 8 to 10 Gbytes/s standards. So, the race for ever greater oscilloscope speeds will continue.
| Read the first part of this interview. |
Q: How is LeCroy addressing signal-integrity issues in these challenging applications?
A: Signal integrity is becoming more and more an issue as digital designers need to send longer and more complex signals at speeds exceeding 5 Gbps. These signals are so fast that fixtures, probes, and cables used in oscilloscope measurements often alter the characteristics of the signals and consequently the measuring results. We’ve addressed this problem with our Eye Doctor signal-integrity software toolset, which includes a “virtual probing” capability that allows engineers to compensate for these fixturing and probing effects. It also provides serial-data-channel emulation and serial-data-receiver equalization, which allows users to precisely measure waveforms with the highest signal fidelity at any place in the test circuit under any test condition.
Q: The technology race aside, what is LeCroy doing to help customers make the most of their equipment investment in a down economy?
A: Probably the most significant thing we’re doing is providing a very good upgrade path for our high-end products, such as the new WaveMaster 8 Zi scopes. Ours is what you might call a design-in upgrade approach. Key elements of our acquisition system are actually socketed, as opposed to soldered onto the board. That allows us to offer a variety of performance-enhancing devices to the main scope design. In addition, we can add proprietary microwave modules that can take our scope up to 30 GHz of bandwidth.
So, if you buy a 4-GHz scope from LeCroy, you can upgrade it to 8 GHz, 13 GHz, 20 GHz, 30 GHz—or anywhere in between. That provides a lot of comfort to engineers who need 16 GHz today, but know they’ll need substantially more in the future. They won’t need to put down $150,000 in another year or two for a more powerful scope.
Among other strategies to protect customer investments, we did not end our legacy products with the introduction of the new WavePro and WaveMaster 7 and 8 lines. That’s been met by a lot of enthusiasm from customers, such as disk-drive manufacturers, who standardized on previous generations of our products.
On the protocol analyzer side of our business, we are also launching a series of low-cost data-storage products with a lot of capabilities found in our higher-end devices. Still another step we’ve taken in such products as the Wave Pro 7 and 8 Zi series is the capability to do high-speed signal acquisition and analysis, while at the same time doing general-purpose troubleshooting tasks on the same scope.
Q: How important is the Protocol Solutions Group to LeCroy’s future?
A: This business is becoming increasingly significant, since our acquisition of two companies in this field over the last five years. Our involvement dates back to 2001 and 2002 when we saw that more and more of our oscilloscope applications were becoming serial-data oriented. Now, we’re developing our protocol analyzers as a separate product line, which is already a market-share leader in protocol analysis for data-storage, computers, peripherals, and wireless applications. And it turns out that our protocol arm has become the bird dog for our scope business—sniffing out what will come next in serial-data standards.
Q: What were your most significant product introductions in the protocol business over the last year?
A: In 2008, we completed our rollout of protocol analyzers for PCI Express 2.0, and in the summer we launched our Sierra M6-4 verification system, a protocol design and test solution for Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA. But probably most important were the upgrades to our Voyager protocol-verification platform to support USB 3.0 development.
Q: How does LeCroy foster innovation among your engineers and scientists?
A: We have awards programs that recognize patents and other technical innovations. We’ve been known to give an individual $100,000 in research money and six months of development time to go out and pursue a breakthrough idea. In another instance, we asked a high-end designer to go off and identify exciting new features for next-generation products. In general, we’ve always relied heavily on our engineers and scientists to raise their hands and give us new ideas for products—as opposed to having the marketing department hand down a list of requirements.
Finally, the international nature of our development team results in a very broad range of technical choices for our new products. We have our Chestnut Ridge, NY, facility for scopes and our Santa Clara, CA, facility for protocol analyzers, as well as large engineering groups in Oregon, Malaysia, and Switzerland. Add to that a substantial number of engineers who work in still other locations. If you are going to get the best people, you need to be very flexible about where they work.
Q: How about technical alliances with other firms?
A: We’ve partnered with a lot of companies on chip development, but probably the longest term relationship has been with IBM, including access to its silicon-germanium technology. Although we certainly aren’t a high-volume IBM customer, we press the technology very hard and stress IBM’s development tools. We’ve also developed excellent relationships with such companies as Toshiba for our high-speed memories.
Q: How much demand do you have for customizing your products?
A: It is very strong on the protocol side of the business particularly, and we’ve won business because of our willingness to meet special needs, such as adding new measurement capability to a device. I would like us to do more of this in these economic times.
Q: How does the new WaveAce oscilloscope series fit into your product mix?
A: It marks LeCroy’s entry into the sub-100 MHz segment, which is an important market especially for our third-party distributors. We’ve worked hard to ensure that this new line lives up to LeCroy standards, and sales so far have exceeded our expectations. The new product line also gives us new access to the university market, where we’ll be introduced to new engineers who will be working with 20-GHz scopes a few years from now.
Q: What geographic areas show promise for growth for LeCroy?
A: From a geographic standpoint, our European outfit has really performed very well over the last five years, though that area won’t be a significant source of growth in coming years. We see much bigger opportunities in the US and Asia. We’ve just started a new subsidiary in China, where we see a great opportunity to gain share.
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