Rudy Severns: Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

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

Setting Sail

As mentioned previously, a desire to work on new and interesting things drove Severns to make many of changes in employment. However, intellectual curiosity was not his only inspiration.

“In 1974 when I left Hughes, I did not leave Hughes for another job. I left Hughes to jump on my schooner and go sailing for the better part of the year in Mexico. I just quit,” says Severns who notes he was divorced at the time.

A sailor’s wanderlust would tempt him away from other jobs too. “In 1977, I left Magnavox, bought a brand new boat, picked it up in Lake Ontario on the east coast up in Canada, sailed out to the east coast, Newfoundland, and did everything down as far as Chesapeake Bay, says Severns in describing his next adventure, which lasted six or seven months.

Then in 1980, Severns left Intersil for six months and took his new wife sailing “up the west coast of the US to British Columbia and spent the summer there and sailed back home again.” That trip more-or-less marked the end of his career as an engineer working within a company. On his return, Severns began doing consulting work for International Rectifier. And with the exception of a stint at Siliconix, he continued to earn a living as an independent consultant for the next 25 years.

Becoming a consultant held many attractions for Severns. Working as an engineer in the corporate world, he never had an interest in becoming a manager, wanting only to do engineering work. However, that aversion to managing severely limited his opportunities for advancement. Consulting, on the other hand, allowed Severns to work on a variety of interesting engineering problems, avoid management responsibilities, while getting paid well.

And because consultants are paid well, there was the added benefit that the customer usually listens to the consultant’s advice, even in cases where they would not accept the same advice from their own engineers. The downside of consulting, says Severns, is it offers “no security of any nature.”

However, that factor did not bother Severns, who never lacked for work anyway. Why was there so much work for Severns as a consultant?

“It was actually multiple things,” says Severns. “First of all, it had a lot to do with the MOSFET coming in and other component changes so that much higher frequency design was going on. Then there was the fact that switchers were now acceptable, they became the standard and the applications for switchers greatly expanded. So there was an enormous increase in work just in the field of switchers. And as soon as the applications expanded, they were short of bodies, especially experienced bodies.”

Much of Severns engineering work involved innovation. But Severns observes, being a consultant often requires that one shy away from innovation when advising clients. That’s because the goal is to help the customer solve the problem without taking any undue technical risks. “So very often I had to give very conservative advice,” says Severns.

As an example Severns cites his work on General Motors’ electric vehicle (EV-1) project. “For the EV-1, I suggested a new design for the charge port, but when it came to all the charge electronics, I said, ‘do it simple, do it this way because it’s reliable. Don’t be elegant, don’t invent.”

Of course, another big attraction of consulting was that it allowed Severns to “abandon the real world” from time to time and go off on his lengthy sailing trips. Curiously, it would be on one of his longer ocean-going adventures when he would do some of his most creative and influental work.

In 1982, Severns took off on a sailing adventure that would take him to Mexico, Hawaii and back over the course of an 18-month trip. During this trip, he wrote a draft of a textbook that would broaden the perspectives of many power supply designers by introducing them to the wide array of power supply topologies that existed.

Abundant Opportunities

Severns' work during his college years with high voltage, high power and RF provided him with good experience for the engineering jobs he would take after graduating from UCLA in 1966. Severns recalls that the job situation at the time for graduating engineers was “wonderful,” as a result of the booming aerospace and military industries and the heavy funding of big science.

Upon graduation, he picked up where he left off in his engineering work by taking a position at the Los Alamos Scientific laboratory, where once again he designed high-power RF amplifiers, pulse modulators and high-voltage, high-power power supplies for the lab's linear particle accelerator. That job also gave Severns the opportunity to publish what would be the first of many papers on power and RF topics.

In that first paper, Severns described techniques for transmitting a pulse across a high-voltage interface to RF pulse modulators that were floating at 50 kV to 100 kV. One of the innovative techniques used light signals transmitted over light pipes using some of the early Hewlett-Packard optoelectronic components.

Severns continued designing pulse modulators and power supplies when he moved to Continental Electronics Corp. in 1968. Another two years later he moved on again to take a job as design engineer at Analog Technology Corp., where he designed power converters for spacecraft physics experiments. Then in 1971, he took a job at Hughes Aircraft Corp. This was followed by stints at Magnavox Research Laboratory from 1974 to 1978 and a short stint in 1978 at TRW, space systems division.

Then as now, job hopping was fairly common among engineers. “In the early '70s, in Southern California, jumping from one company to the next was de rigeur,” says Severns, and he did so for various reasons. “But in general, my motivation was to find something interesting to do. I looked at the work that was available and what I was doing today. If I was finishing up a project, and it was getting boring and routine, I'd go off and find a new job.”

Fortunately for Severns, there were many interesting jobs in the late '60s and early '70s. At Analog Technology, he worked on deep-space instrumentation for projects such as the Mariner mission to Mars. Then at Hughes, he did design work (using traveling wave tube amplifiers) on some of the early communications satellites. Both jobs were “really fascinating work” that involved developing new circuits.

At Magnavox, he was among those doing the early development work on global positioning systems (GPS). For Severns, the GPS project was his first opportunity to design low-voltage dc power supplies, which would power the GPS receivers.

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