I was an Analog Devices product engineer

A Web-exclusive sidebar running with our June 2006 cover story, "The world is still analog."

-- Test & Measurement World, 6/1/2006

Upon graduating from college in 1980, I worked in a one-year rotational program at Analog Devices in Norwood, MA. At the time, the Norwood facility manufactured modular ADCs, DACs, programmable gain amplifiers (PGAs) and other components. My first rotation was in product engineering.

On my first day, I was assigned the job of evaluating a PGA that was to mount on a board-level data-acquisition system. The system, called "mMAC," was eventually sold to Azonix Corp.(Coincidentally, I also worked for a while at Azonix as an applications engineer, but the sale took place after I left Azonix, which manufactured the mMAC product line until 2005.)

The PGA module was a fairly simple device. It contained an op amp and an analog switch. Three digital control lines selected the switch, placing resistors in the circuit that set the op amp's gain. I evaluated a dozen or so modules. "You'll need six weeks to evaluate these modules," the product engineering manager told me. That seemed like a long time for such a simple design, but he was right. I had to measure gain, offset, linearity, frequency response, and other parameters over a wide temperature range.

First, though, I had to build my own test fixture. The fixture consisted of pins to accept the module and banana posts for connecting test equipment—a DMM and an analog oscilloscope. No PC-based measurement equipment in those days.

The product evaluation took six weeks to the day. The manager, impressed with my report, told me to consider a career in technical writing. He was right.—Martin Rowe, Senior Technical Editor.