Credit a fork's shorting the toaster: Q and A with Steve Woodward
By Warren Webb, Technical Editor -- EDN, January 20, 2005
With more than 30 contributions to his credit, Steve Woodward is one of EDN's most prolific Design Ideas authors. His offerings started in 1974 with an idea entitled "Simple 10-kHz V/F features differential inputs," for which he won the annual prize for the best Design Idea. As a self-proclaimed "certified, card-carrying analog dinosaur," most of Woodward's ideas solve issues in that nebulous "nondigital" area of design engineering that gives us the thorniest problems. His Design Idea titles, such as "Self-heated transistor digitizes airflow" in 1996 and "Circuit controls microneedle etching" in 2003 demonstrate how he likes to adapt electronics to the physical world.
Woodward is an instrumentation, sensors, and metrology free-lance consultant to organizations such as Agilent Technologies, The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Catalyst Semiconductor, Oak Crest Science Institute, and several international universities. With six patents to his credit, he has authored more than 160 professional articles. He has also served as a member of technical staff at the University of North Carolina. He lives with his wife, Clare, and sons in Chapel Hill, NC.
EDN: When you were growing up, what got you excited about technology, and where did you learn engineering?
Woodward: I'm told by my mother that my interest in things electrical began at age three when I stuck a fork into a toaster and got a nasty—and presumably exciting—shock! But then Mom is known for "creative" stories. Truthfully, I can't remember a time when I wasn't fascinated by technology—both real and fanciful. Issac Asimov was my favorite author—for obvious reasons.
I was born in Fort Smith, AK, moved to California in 1960, and received my high-school and undergraduate-college education in the LA area. I got a BSE (cum laude) from CalTech, Class of '68. I then moved to Chapel Hill, NC, for grad school (master's degree in computer science in 1970), and here we are still today.
EDN: What are you working on now, and what is your biggest technical challenge?
Woodward: Actually, a recently published EDN Design Idea comes from a current project to help develop a space-flight-capable, self-contained, tunable diode-laser spectrophotometer. Such projects entail many design challenges with their requirements for low power consumption and endurance of environmental extremes. But one of the hardest is to confine component selection to existing lists of certified-space-capable, preferred components.
The process of flight certification of components is an expensive and lengthy process and is funded only spottily and—primarily—by individual instrument development projects. As a result, the components that appear in these lists—for example, the NPSL [NASA Parts Selection List] have typically been there for a long time. They're therefore often quite obsolete.
[Consider] the constraints of weight and power consumption already imposed by design for planetary exploration. Imposing the additional fiscal one of needing to design with older parts to avoid the large expense of qualifying newer ones outside the budget of the project can make an engineer's life very interesting indeed.
EDN: Has your work been affected by the trend toward outsourcing engineering talent?
Woodward: Well, as a free-lance consultant, I'm one of those "outsources." So, I guess I'd happily say "yes."
EDN: What do you do for fun?
Woodward: I enjoy spending time with my family, swimming, shooting, and generalized tinkering. I'm also a private pilot, and you may see me flying around the Chapel Hill skies in a Piper Cherokee Warrior.
