The Technician Can Be a Key Contributor to Modern Power Research

Sep 25, 2007 10:26 AM
By Alan Elbanhawy, Director, Advanced Power System Center, Fairchild Semiconductor International, San Jose, Calif.

In this age of extreme specialization and fast time-to-market demands, we need both the dedicated design engineer and the dedicated technician to do the best job possible and move the development process much faster to fruition. For the power field, this means that the design engineer needs to understand very well the implications of the circuit layout and component selection on the final product. Meanwhile, the technician needs to fully understand well how to design his pc board, do component selection, and perform the tests to complement the design activity and produce a viable product.

In addition, the technician must be able to work with minimum coaching from the design engineer. In turn, that demands the technician have enough knowledge, experience and understanding of power circuits to fully do the job with very little guidance.

To achieve this ideal situation, it’s necessary to make some minor changes in the way we educate engineers and technicians. To give design engineers the needed awareness of pc-board layout and component selection concerns, they need greater exposure to more practical experience, which could be achieved by instituting more co-op programs in universities. On the other hand, technicians could benefit from more experiment-based theoretical courses in their education.

These changes should blur the line somewhat between the job of the design engineer and the technician, but create an excellent research and development team.

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© 2007 Penton Media, Inc.