INTERVIEW AMP had been headquartered in the area since the 1940’s, and many support industries had grown in the area. There were about 60 different connector manufactures located near Harrisburg. I was the first EE hired by Samtec, and part of my job was to build an SI engineering team. We’re still here with 18 engineers locally, and we’ve also added SI engineering groups in Taiwan, China, and Oregon. Could you tell us a little about the design support that Samtec offers? We try to differentiate ourselves from some of the larger connector companies with our level of support. When we started our group, most companies were providing good support to what we would call Tier 1 companies, but they would pretty much ignore the smaller businesses. At Samtec, those smaller companies are a focus for us—we have around 20,000 active customers today. Some of them don’t have engineers who are well versed in SI principles and problems. We’ve been willing to do a lot of work for them. One of our goals is to be “the easiest connector to design in.” Part of this requires very detailed characterization testing, and making this information easily available on the web. SI wise, connectors are poorly covered by industry standards, so test procedures are not well defined and data reporting is not standardized. We also do what we call “customer support R&D,” where we work to develop better test procedures. The end goal is to characterize our products fully so our customers can trust our data so they don’t have to do the characterization work themselves. We take this same approach to modeling, where we provide connector models in most popular formats. This has changed over the years; SPICE was king and we
Samtec’s Avanced Design System (ADS) Interface
provided as many as eight various flavors such as PSPICE and HSPICE. We did a lot of post-processing work to convert our files so they were pointand-click usable by our customers. As the industry has moved to more microwave-type simulators, we’ve changed our modeling processes so we can provide S-parameter models. We also work with simulation tool vendors directly—we buy some tools for the sole purpose of making sure our models work easily and correctly in each tool. What tools are the most popular? In the last four or five years, there’s been a trend toward more S-Parameter based simulators, where simulation times are faster than SPICE at higher frequencies. Agilent’s ADS is probably the most popular currently, but it’s a dynamic situation, with a lot of players trying to carve out a niche as the industry shifts. Back to our large
customer base, we were fortunate because we could see the industry leaders in system design migrating towards ADS early on, as they’d ping us for certain types of models. That allows us to see over time where the industry is going as the newer tools progress and get cheaper, more user friendly ,and propagate through the industry. There are still many of our customers who use SPICE, so we can’t abandon SPICE models. We still provide backwards compatible and older format models for our less bleeding-edge customers. What is the process of designing your connectors? I’ve been designing connectors for more than 20 years, and in the past, connector design was primarily driven by mechanical issues. There was a lot of effort put into the physical interface design for robustness, reliability—those kinds of things. Of course, there have always been Visit www.eeweb.com
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