Help Choose The 2004 Test Engineer of the Year

Engineers often comment that the test function gets second billing to design in many companies. Yet without careful testing, design teams not only hurt their chances of success as products move from concept to reality, but they also risk outright failure, sometimes resulting in loss of life when products malfunction. Moreover, engineering test is unique in that it plays a role throughout a product's life cycle—from concept through manufacturing, field test, and failure analysis.

Test & Measurement World wants to acknowledge the special contributions that engineering test makes with our new "Test Engineer of the Year" award. Sponsored by National Instruments, the award carries with it a $20,000 educational grant presented to an engineering school designated by the winning engineer. We will present the award at our "Best in Test" awards celebration, scheduled for February 24, 2004, at the Anaheim Hilton during the APEX Show. A story describing the accomplishments of the winning engineer will appear in our March 2004 issue.

What qualities does it take to be selected as North America's premier test engineer? You be the judge. Help to honor your profession by voting for the 2004 Test Engineer of the Year. Please review the profiles of the outstanding nominees on these pages, mark your choice on the postcard ballot that you'll find in your September print issue, and return it to us. We must receive your ballot by November 3, 2003.

Darrel Russell designs and integrates the test systems used by Lockheed Martin to test fighter aircraft such as the F/A-22 and the new Joint Strike Fighter (F-35). His job involves system design of the instruments used to test aircraft, and Russell is in charge of all technology integration for flight test. "I'm given a test requirement, and I have to find what will do the job and someone to do it, or find a way for us to do it. Then we'll integrate components and equipment and put a system on an airplane." And Russell's group must thoroughly test instrumentation systems prior to flight to ensure they will not fail. A failed test wastes money and time—precious commodities when deadlines loom. Russell graduated with an Electrical and Electronic Engineering Technology (EET) degree from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX.

With a background in programming, engineering, and mathematics, Ken Brey brings a unique perspective to the development of vision systems, data-acquisition systems, and factory-automation systems. He has worked on many projects for customers such as Baxter and ITW during his six years at DMC, a Chicago-based system integrator. A vision system that Brey developed for Amphenol won a 2002 solution of the year award from Advanced Imaging magazine.

Recently, Brey developed a vision system that needed to measure the width of vertical lines, etched with a laser, on a material with a surface that looked like Swiss cheese. The width of the lines was less than the size of the "lumps" in the material, which often obscured the lines. Using a scripting language, Brey averaged hundreds of pixels, which, because of the random nature of the material's surface, produced images from which the vision system could measure the linewidth.

Machine-vision supplier DVT reports that Brey is a "go-to guy" because of his analytical approach to problem solving.

"Test is a great field. Everything you do is for customers. Every part you fail represents a bad part that customers don't get." That's an opinion that has motivated Sun Microsystems' Scott Davidson to take a leadership role in promoting the test-engineering function. Davidson has presented approximately 15 papers and organized eight panels that have been instrumental in breaking down the wall between design and test.

Davidson, who studied microprogramming in college, now focuses on end-to-end testing flow. He foresees an increasing emphasis on system test. It's silly, he says, to pursue miniscule improvements in an IC's single-stuck-fault coverage, when the critical question is, "What's failing in the field?"

Davidson sees an increasing emphasis on being able to correlate system-level field failures with semiconductor test data. He says that a big advantage in working for a vertically integrated company, like Sun, is that he can determine if and how perturbations in a fab line affect the system, something tough to do if you're buying components from someone else. At Sun, he can take a chip-to-system view that will afford him valuable new insights that he can share with the design-and-test community.

David Goldberg of Boeing Satellite Systems has been on the forefront of test engineering, focusing on improving the performance of microwave high-power amplifiers for communications satellites through better design, manufacture, and test. Two recent efforts highlight his skills.

In a joint project of Boeing and Agilent Technologies, he helped develop a broadband test in which a vector network analyzer employs swept tone spacing to measure the magnitude and relative phase of intermodulation products to determine an amplifier's distortion properties. His approach makes the test orders of magnitude faster than that obtainable with traditional techniques.

The second project is the modernization of Boeing's linearized-traveling-wave-tube-amplifier (L-TWTA) tuning software, which allows an operator to select optimal bias-voltages via a test-and-analysis process that lets the operator see the impact of a bias-adjustment in real time.

In these and other projects, Goldberg, who holds an MSEE degree from Cornell, has consistently met the stringent measurement challenges of aerospace applications.

Chris Grachanen manages the metrology laboratory at Hewlett-Packard (formerly Compaq). He's contributed to the measurements community in many ways. He prepared the lab for and received National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program accreditation in 1998, making the Compaq lab one of the first to meet the stringent requirements. The accreditation required a year of preparation while Grachanen documented the lab's calibration procedures and improved measurement uncertainty.

Grachanen developed several software tools for metrologists, including a tolerance calculator and an uncertainty calculator. He's made these programs available to the engineering community at no charge.

In 2002, he spearheaded an effort through the American Society of Quality to develop a program for certifying calibration technicians. He is now working to develop and implement training courses and an examination schedule. Grachanen has also authored numerous conference papers for the NCSLI Symposium and the Measurement Science Conference.

In a GE Medical Systems career that spans nearly 25 years, electrical engineer Mike Harsh has worked on many of the company's major diagnostic devices—from x-ray to magnetic resonance imaging to ultrasound. But his latest project, a noninvasive technology to evaluate prostate cancer, may be the most important yet.

"We looked at the most pressing clinical needs and saw that prostate cancer was one of the leading causes of death in men—with nearly 30,000 deaths and 220,000 new cases reported each year," notes Harsh, the general manager of Global MR Engineering.

What Harsh and his team developed in response to this challenge was the first noninvasive medical imaging system to evaluate prostate cancer's location, size, and aggressiveness. Called PROSE, the new system integrates GE's proprietary spectroscopy technology with its magnetic resonance imaging equipment. The technology is even more effective when combined with GE's new 3.0 Tesla EXCITE MRI platform, which delivers better image quality and much faster patient exams.