Does The Fire Burn And The Wonder Still Exist?

Was the title of an editorial in the May 15, 2000 issue of the Electronic Design magazine by their Editor in Chief, Dave Bursky, and it certainly got my attention. After having spend 35 years in electronic engineering, I can emphatically relate to his description of the human elements of our profession, and the questions he asked concerning our future. Bursky writes:

Innovation is the Driving Force in the Electronic Industry

And about us engineers, he says: The enthusiasm that these people bring to the industry stems from their fervent belief that they have [or can] developed something great. Their self-generated drive comes from the love of what they do and for the technology. Much of that love, or passion to create, is what drove us to become engineers. ... Creating something out of nothing, pushing the limits on performance to another level, ... are the thrills that drove many of us to become and encouraged us to remain engineers. --- Where My Heart will take me!

Many people will not share these glowing words describing our profession --- instead, beginning in high school, they call us "Nerds"! (Please substitute latest term) However, this attitude of theirs reverses quickly after one of us "geeks" has made his or her first million dollar with an innovation. Yes, monetary reward is also part of our motivation, but even for the very young of us our major motivation is the one described by Dave Bursky. (For wonderful actual quotes, see the EE Times survey, September 03, on last page.) For many of thousands of years this has been the driving force for the architectural engineers who build the Egyptian pyramids, the Chinese wall, the Greek and Roman temples and the Cathedrals of the Middle Ages. While these architects worked on a scale of yards and miles, we electronics engineers today work with mills and microns, but the concept is the same. When one has spend a lifetime in this "business of creation" an even greater meaning becomes apparent. We begin to realize that our motivation is actually what Joseph Campbell describes for "The Heroes Journey". The "dream" of a young boy in the Middle Ages, to become a knight at King Arthur's court, and the "dream" of a boy in the 1940's, to become an electronic engineer at Bell Labs or IBM are one and the same. Both hope to find the "Holy Grail", to make a difference in this world.

When I was a boy and read Knights of the Round Table, myth stirred me to think that I could be a hero. I wanted to go out and do battle with dragons, to go into the dark forest and slay evil. What does it say to you that myths can cause the son of an Oklahoma farmer to think himself as a hero? ------ Bill Moyers

Joseph Campbell reminds us that: to follow these "dreams" takes determination to let us overcome the many obstacles put in our way, because many societies and institutions (large corporations) do not encourage it. The Asian cultures for instant don't value, as much as we do in the West, creativity or its prerequisite, "individualism". The Chinese Empire had gunpowder long before the West discovered it, but they never used it to develop guns. No, not because they are a more peace-loving people, their history was as violent as ours was. Then why have all great advances in politics, business, science and technology initially been rejected --- and many times with great violence?

Sustaining and Disruptive Innovations

The reason is that there are two types of "innovations", the <sustaining> ones and the <disruptive> ones. For business, Prof. Clayton M. Christensen of the Harvard Business School discovered this just a few years ago. The Innovator's Dilemma, When new Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. (The term <disruptive> applies to the industry involved, while for the consumer these are <enabling> innovations.) The Microprocessor chip for PCs was such a (disruptive/enabling) innovation, but so was the use of gunpowder for weapon development.
Have You Missed the News?
This new research by Prof. Clayton Christensen is of such an importance that any writings on "innovation" without knowing it compare to writing about nuclear physics without knowing quantum mechanics. A good example is the recent EDN supplement: "a decade of innovation", where Carly Fiorina says she will move HP back into the garage where it started. I hope she can forgive an old Bell Labs colleague of hers, suggesting she spend too much time in her kitchen and got fascinated with her trash-compactor. (It doesn't work Carly, especially as a metaphor.) Clayton writes: "Despite the fact that lots of people at HP and Agilent have apparently read The Innovator's Dilemma and claim to believe the ideas, the number of them who have actually changed the way they manage development of new products and their associated markets is small." I find no change in EDN's staff either; their choices for the best innovations of the T&M industry for the last 3 years are precisely the ones that clearly indicate to me the demise of this industry. For the first time in history we have a much better understanding about the evolution of technology and why great Industrial Empires are collapsing, e.g. Minicomputer firms. Will these new understanding change events? No, I see no signs of comprehension, history will repeat itself.

These <disruptive> innovations are the "Holy Grail" of engineering; they are the innovations which provide the great leaps in the evolution of technology. (Christensen astutely observed that: "these disruptions have been a fundamental mechanism by which the quality of our lives has improved.) It is here where our large corporations rival the Asian cultures in resisting innovations --- it took two "individual" engineers in a garage to start Apple Computers and Bill and Paul in their homes to make Microsoft happen. What would have been the result if Jon Titus had walked into Digital Equipment Corp.'s office to show them the World's first PC design? He would never have gotten past first-line supervision --- but it would have made a nice footnote in the annals of engineering. Such as the famous words by Ross Perot who said, "What do these ten people in Redmond know that we don't know?" when it was suggested that he should buy Microsoft.

Realizing the Grail

The legend of the grail tells us that the negative reaction of large corporations (or Kingdoms) is nothing new --- the Grail king, who is as maimed and lame as the whole country is, rejects the knight. (Campbell says that TS Eliot used that idea in his poem The Wasteland, and that he actually quotes several lines from Wolfram's Parzival. The wasteland is a place where the sense of the vitality of life has gone. People take jobs because they have to live...) What this tells us is that "Realizing the Grail" is as much a social and psychological problem as it is an engineering (or knightly) accomplishment. ---------While these problems happen in the middle or at the end of our "Heroes Journey", there are other obstacles which we must face right at the beginning. Just as a young man in the Middle Ages, with a dream of knighthood, had to have three "things" --- talent, training and tools, the young person today needs them too. While a young man, not being of noble birth in the Middle Ages, could start his training with wooden shield and wooden sword, no matter how proficient he became with these primitive tools, he would need real armor, a real sword and a good horse to finish his training. This was of great expense at that time and his "dream of knighthood" might have ended right then and there. When my "dream" began at an age of ten in 1945, I was more fortunate. The roads of northern Germany were littered with military communication equipment - shot-up by British fighter-bombers, but I still found useful parts. In retrospect, it wasn't the short-wave receiver, which I managed to get to work again, but the several Volts and Ampere meters I found which helped me understand electronics. ("tools")

Seeing is believing --- and for science, a quest for understanding.

The young person today needs different tools (for hardware engineering), but if s/he lives in a developed country, most are no problem. Any of today's PC's will do, and a student version of Intusoft Spice can be had for $35 with an excellent instruction book. Multimeters are cheap at RadioShack and parts are free as samples from manufacturers, but the one important tool, for which I longed-for all through college, is still not affordable today for most students --- the high bandwidth (GHz) oscilloscope. This instrument is the "flagship" of the T&M industry, it is of vital importance for an "intuitive understanding" of electronics, because we can't "see" what goes on in our circuits. Microbiologist and astronomers are in the same situation, they could not do their job without a microscope or telescope. --- (Computer-simulation? - ha!)

Mankind's progress is defined by its tools.
Even the wheel needed tools for creation. Fire became useful when it could be created at will with tools. Since then significant progress has been made, fueled by successive key enabling tools. We are now in the information age, made possible by electronics developed with EDA tools. ----------- While most of the 'buzz' has recently been focused on the dot.com world, the EDA industry has quietly continued to play its crucial role in the growth of a nearly $1 trillion dollar electronics industry. Anything electronic that you can think of-from computer chips, cellular phones, and pace-makers to controls for automobiles and satellites, to the servers, routers, and switches, that run the Internet-everything electronic in the world today benefits from its designers employing the tools and services of the EDA Industry. As electronics become even more complex and more pervasive, the EDA Industry's pivotal role in enabling the entire electronics value chain is more vital to the continued success of global economy. ------ Pamela Parrish, Executive Director EDA Consortium

The personal GigaHertz scope is my own personal "Holy Grail" for which I have been searching for most of my life, and now I've found it. It took me more than 5 engineering-man-years, spread out over 20 years, until I was too old to do the "garage-thing". Of course, no T&M firm will make and market it, because it is a <disruptive innovation>. Disruptive to whom? To the old and decadent T&M industry, not to the large majority of our profession, or the million of students and young engineers, for them it would be a valued treasure! Bursky writes: What drives you? I wonder what industry challenges and forces there are that makes you passionate about what you do and how you channel that into something positive. I'd like to know if creativity and challenge are still the key reasons for you to continue in this field. Faith of the Heart (click it)

I see my own "challenge" now in spreading awareness to the other 98.5% of our electronic engineering profession: of how maimed and lame the "Grail Kings of T&M" are, and how their industry has become a "Waste Land". The lack of cost-effective, high-performance "tools" hurts us all, because our progress depends on these. We are being overcharged (taxed) not by a factor of two or three, but by more than an order of magnitude! Is this a "Call to Arms"? No, only to awareness, I "love" my old personal 221 Tek scope and I always respected HP, but as VP Pat Gelsinger of Intel has shown convincingly, at the International Test&Measurement conference, Sept. 99, T&M will be in the minicomputer-position very soon. Will they survive? No! There is no indication of appropriate actions, instead they are still playing <musical chairs>, marching to the song "Pop goes the weasel"; and when the music stops, most chairs will be gone. All I can do is outline concepts and architectures for the new type of future instrumentation and offer the first sample of these, a GigaHertz DSO on a PCMCIA Card. If this will help build a new group of companies providing T&M, then I am still very much on the "Grail Quest".

As Joseph Campbell said: The problem of the grail quest is the re-vitalization of what is known as the WasteLand. The WasteLand is a world where people live not out of their own initiative, but out of what they think they're supposed to do. People have inherited their official roles and positions; they haven't earned them. This is the situation of the Wasteland, ... a place where the sense of the vitality of life has gone. (See also Mathew 5 13-16 - "Ye are the Salt of the earth ..")

MOYERS: There is a wonderful image in "King Arthur" where the knights of the Round Table are about to enter the search for the grail in the Dark Forest, and the narrator says, "They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. So each entered the forest at a separate point of his choice." You've interpreted that to express the Western emphasis upon the unique phenomenon of a single human life --the individual confronting darkness. --- CAMPBELL: What struck me when I read that in the thirteenth-century "Queste del Graal" was that it epitomizes an especially Western spiritual aim and ideal, which is, of living the life that is potential in "you" and was never in anyone else as a possibility. This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentiality, not someone else's. Joseph Campbell: THE POWER OF MYTH, with Bill Moyers

Finding the innovative solution (the Grail) is a task for the creative "individual", but the decision to go on the "Quest" in the first place, and to realize its necessity, was made "jointly" by the executive board, the Vice Presidents of "King Arthur's" court; and they all had a "Vision" of the Grail. Today, the T&M industry is in similar circumstances, but where is a CEO of King Arthur's greatness, and where is a VP Galahad or Garvain? And where is the Vision? And do we even have a Round Table in the boardrooms of the T&M industry? -- MORE --- or Back to Index

See also U.S. Leadership Relies on Engineering (This one page paper needs to be printed out to be easily readable http://www.msmisp.com/futuretest/maxim.htm , A truly visionary prediction by Jack Gifford, CEO of Maxim Inc. This is no “Chicken Little story, if anyone in the World has the qualification in both, business and electronic, to tell us this, it is him. --- Nearly the same message comes from CEO Barret of Intel http://www.msmisp.com/futuretest/Barret-Intel.htm  and http://www.msmisp.com/futuretest/Barrett concludes.htm ---- And here is the latest story: http://www.msmisp.com/futuretest/US-Leadership.htm