Design mistakes happen
Written by John Teel.
When I was a microchip designer for Texas Instruments I remember a newly hired engineer saying something he would later regret.
He was a super bright guy who had considerable experience, but he was overly confident.
And, he was…rather…eccentric, with unkempt hair that looked like someone from an ’80s rock band after a night of hard partying.
His usual attire was a thin white t-shirt never meant to be worn alone, sometimes with holes, coupled with cut-off sweatpants.
Thankfully, TI had no dress code for engineers:)
He had finished his first chip design for TI and had just gotten some of the first units back for initial testing.
Within a couple of days he confidently told me “I think I may have a first-pass success with no design issues at all!”
Well, I wasn’t so sure.
I had the privilege of working with some incredibly intelligent engineers at TI, a few I would even call true geniuses (a term I don’t use lightly).
You know what?
Not a single one of the engineers (myself included) had ever designed a new chip without there being issues of some kind that needed to be fixed in a revision. This happened with every single design.
With a new chip design, fabrication can take months and the setup cost is well into the tens of thousands of dollars.
So chip design companies spend a lot of time and money trying to reduce any design mistakes before producing any units.
This includes having designers run a lot of simulations.
I would sometimes spend months running simulations on a new design.
You also have to go through formal design reviews where lots of other engineers show up looking to find mistakes in your work.
I remember being terrified to hold my first design review. They were very intimidating.
Yet, with so many smart engineers, running so many simulations, and having so many design reviews, every design still always had mistakes.
So I didn’t have much confidence in this engineer’s supposed accomplishment just yet.
Well, only a few days later, all hell broke loose.
After looking at more than just a few units, he discovered there was a serious design flaw.
Oops.
But it gets worse.
This was such a serious flaw that it couldn’t be fixed with any kind of design revision.
He had to entirely redesign it from the ground up essentially starting from scratch.
Ouch!
Needless to say, this lowered his confidence level quite a lot.
Mistakes happen, no matter what, so plan on them.
Even huge tech companies, with so many bright engineers, and even more processes and procedures, make mistakes.
If you aren’t making mistakes then you’re usually playing it too safe, and not trying hard enough.
Embrace your mistakes, learn from them, then just move on.
If you’ve recently made a mistake, hopefully this email helps you feel a bit better about it:)
If you want to avoid some of the common mistakes then join my Hardware Academy platform where you get personal help from myself and other experts along with extensive training courses.
