Industry Insider: Getting to Know the People That Make Up Our World
ConnectorSupplier.com profiles the best engineers from the four corners of our industry. In this issue, we meet a signal integrity educator and entrepreneur.

Recognizing “Best” Engineers: Howard W. Johnson, Ph.D.
Mike Wondolowski, engineer at Zebra Technologies, said, “Dr. Johnson has the ability to bring to bear his vast experience in signal integrity (SI) in addressing complex SI issues. He then organizes this information in a clear and concise way that benefits the many engineers who read his newsletter, attend his classes, or read his writings.”

Name: Howard W. Johnson, Ph.D.
Location: Twisp, Washington, U.S.
Current position: Author, inventor, entrepreneur
Industry affiliations or organizations: Howard frequently teaches technical seminars at Oxford University, where he was named a Visiting Fellow. He has taught at hundreds of other sites worldwide. He has served as the EDN “Signal Integrity” columnist since 1997.

Accomplishments you’re proud of: Do you use voicemail? I created the original product plan and speech coding technology for “Phonemail,” the first digital, integrated voicemail system. That product spawned a whole new industry. Do you use computer networking? I served as the chief technical editor of standards for IEEE 802.3 Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet. Working closely with Geoff Thompson, Howard Frazier, and hundreds of other engineers, I helped create the Fast and Gigabit Ethernet standards we all enjoy today.

Digital hardware? I am the author of High-Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic, the groundbreaking classic text, still in print after 16 years. How about digital signal processing? My FFT algorithms for the length 17, 19, and 25 sequences, created during my graduate-student years at Rice University, have yet to be surpassed.

My wife Liz and I have raised two fine daughters. We live on a horse ranch in the Cascade Mountains, on the sunny, dry side of Washington state, near the Canadian border.

First job: TV repairman, at the age of 15.

Favorite website: www.wsjonline.com

The last book I read: Quantum Reality, by Nick Herbert. I’m always looking for better ways to explain complex phenomena.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have: Mortgaged my home to buy Apple stock in 2003.

The best advice anyone ever gave me was: Pick a hobby that teaches you something. Successful people absorb 99 percent of their knowledge outside the classroom. This does not mean you should skip school. It means you should learn 100 times what school has to teach. A useful hobby engages your mind and introduces you to like-minded, success-oriented people. Successful people love to learn.

People lacking useful skills or knowledge are forced to trade their time for money. Time is all they have to offer. An hour of uneducated time pays only about $7.25 in the United States.

Successful people cut a different deal with life. They do not trade their time for money. As outlined by Robert Kiyosaki in his book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, successful people create value directly, and then trade that value for money.

My way of creating value involved first learning the art of high-speed digital design. Once mastered, I began teaching seminars in that area. My clients pay me not for the time I spend in the classroom, but for the lifetime of experience I bring with me and for my ability to communicate that experience in a way that improves their technical capabilities and, often, changes their lives. That's value. Here's the good part: I get to sell the same lifetime of experience over and over. I've done about 250 classes so far, and expect to continue for some time. That is the way value works. You never run out of it.

(“Why Teach Science” www.sigcon.com/Pubs/edn/WhyTeachScience.htm)

What trend in the industry is affecting your job and what would you like to do about it? I'm very concerned about the E.U. RoHS regulations that ban leaded solder in electronic products. Even the U.S. EPA admits that banning lead in this instance is a poor environmental decision. Studies from the U.S. EPA (environmental protection agency) conclusively demonstrate that banning lead requires a substantial increase in tin production around the world, and tin mining is a very nasty business. Lead, as you may know, is no longer actively mined for electronic solder production. We recycle plenty of high-grade lead from used car batteries. The effective result of banning lead in solder is simply a substantial worldwide increase in tin production.

In addition, lead-free solder suffers three crippling defects. (1) No lead-free solder has been shown to create as good or as reliable a solder joint as lead-based solder. (2) Lead-free solder requires much higher processing temperatures that stress board materials and components. (3) Lead-free conductive coatings all appear to develop “tin whiskers” over time, which can short out critical functions.

I have heard my fill of solder-reliability experts who espouse the view that these defects don't matter because, “Most electronic products go obsolete after three years anyway.” That is a shortsighted and dangerous viewpoint.

The RoHS initiative bans several other substances as well, all of which we seem to be able to get along without, but I wish we could repeal the “lead-free” portion of the RoHS initiative.

“Rollback the Lead-Free Initiative”  www.sigcon.com/Pubs/news/10_01.htm

Other comments: I had the great fortune to become associated with a high-value mentor early in my career. Professor Martin Graham, previously chair of the U.C. Berkeley EE department and a pioneer of the computer age, taught me a great deal of what I know about high-speed digital systems. It is my privilege to disseminate that knowledge to thousands of engineers annually through my seminars and writings. Professor Graham's teaching process relied on lots of personal interaction and lots of time in the lab trying things. Unfortunately, engineers today, due to the highly compressed schedules imposed by their tight time-to-market requirements, now have much less time to experiment, and therefore less time to ”learn,” than did I. You can sense the flavor of our interactions in these three articles, a tribute to his teaching style:

“Space-Time Diagrams” www.sigcon.com/Pubs/news/12_02.htm
“Nibble Effect” www.sigcon.com/Pubs/news/12_03.htm
“Current-Source Driver” www.sigcon.com/Pubs/news/12_04.htm
 
I'd like to work with as many engineers as possible, inspiring them to pass on hard-fought knowledge to their co-workers through education and shared lab work.

Send Dr. Johnson your comments at www.sigcon.com.