Rudy Severns: Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM
By David Morrison, Editor in Chief

On the 50th anniversary of his first jump from a biplane, Rudy Severns went skydiving yet again, pushing his lifetime total to somewhere in the vicinity of 500 jumps. Throughout his career, he took breaks for months-long sailing voyages, which usually necessitated a job change on his return. When it was time to fulfill his military obligation, a young Severns parlayed his experience as a radio operator into a stint with the Army's Special Forces, where he learned the skills of unconventional warfare.

Given his bent for adventure, is it any wonder that Severns' career as an engineer, author, instructor and consultant was marked by a similar sense of adventure? When the early generations of power MOSFETs were helping to propel switch-mode power-supply (SMPS) design into the commercial mainstream, Severns realized that engineers were limiting their power-supply designs to a very narrow set of topologies. In writing the landmark text Modern DC to DC Switchmode Power Converter Circuits, which he co-authored with Ed Bloom, Severns set out to introduce engineers to the hundreds of power-supply topologies that were available.

A similarly adventurous spirit may have been at work in the late 1970s when Severns made the then-radical proposal to a PowerCon audience that power-supply designers consider moving to higher switching frequencies for certain applications. His PowerCon 5 paper anticipated what would become an industry trend toward high-frequency switching only a few years later. But that trend was anything but obvious at the time, and the show organizer even suggested for his next paper that he go with something less “blue sky.”

Severns was also sailing into uncharted waters when, as a semiconductor applications engineer in the late '70s and early '80s, he began working with power MOSFETs. Severns not only needed to figure out how to use these new components, he had to teach power-supply designers how to use them. That gave Severns his first foray into teaching power electronics, an activity with which he would become more involved in time.

Working with those early power MOSFETs, Severns was also among those who were discovering their peculiarities and their failure modes. He wrote several papers documenting these problems, worked with customers to address these issues in their designs and then worked with his company's device designers to eliminate some of the early MOSFET weaknesses.

Prior to becoming an applications engineer, Severns worked in industry for many years designing high-voltage, high-power supplies for space, military and science applications. In these assignments, the unforgiving nature of high-voltage design undoubtedly added an element of danger and adventure to his work, while also giving Severns a grounding in SMPS technology and opportunities to innovate.

But before that career started, there would be several adventures that would help shape his later life in ways big and small. As a youngster, Severns would get a taste for electronics and experimentation, beginning his lifelong involvement with amateur radio. He would receive a surprisingly good grounding in math and science at his small country high school.

Then after graduation, he would get a chance to mature in the military while undergoing some rather exotic training in an Army Special Forces unit. And finally, he would enroll in a college engineering program, where he would tailor his curriculum to suit his interests, while gaining valuable work experience as a technician in particle accelerator labs.

Small School, Quality Education

Born in San Francisco in 1937, Severns’ family moved a number of times before settling just outside of Bremerton, Wash., around the time Severns entered the sixth grade. Severns’ mother was a licensed vocational nurse and his stepfather was a pipefitter at the naval base in Bremerton. Though their educational backgrounds were modest, his parents conveyed a deep respect for education. That attitude no doubt helped Severns to take advantage of the opportunities he found at Central Kitsap High School. There, says Severns, he received an “extraordinarily good education.”

Though it was a small, rural high school with only 92 students in his graduating class, Central Kitsap had very good teachers. As a result, the school offered a particularly strong math, physics and chemistry program.

For any high school to be so strong in math and science was a rarity in the 1950s, says Severns. (“Senior math class included calculus,” recalls Severns.) So, it was all the more remarkable that Central Kitsap was a “country” high school. Just a few years ago when Severns attended his 50th reunion, he and his classmates were amazed to discover that 20-plus members of their class went on to become engineers.

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