The home lab of Alan Martin

After the success of my blogs about Barrie Gilbert’s home lab, and Darryl Phillips home lab, I wanted to show you my pal Alan Martin’s lab. Alan is over at Texas Instruments these days, via National Semiconductor. He has also had stints at Sipex and Linear Technology. Alan’s lab is like a lot of ours, so I will show you a picture of the way I found it one day, when he has piled a bunch of stuff on his bench. Not quite Bob Pease or Jim Williams messy, but pretty bad. Click on any image to enlarge.

The thing is, Alan is the guy we gave the EDN Engineer Extraordinaire award to years ago. And that is when I showed you his collection of scopes and current probes. The story is that when he was working as an FAE at Linear Technology, Bob Dobkin once told him “You will never understand a switching power supply unless you have a current probe.” Alan took that to heart and started collecting from that day forward. I think he told me he has hundreds of current probes. You can read his touching response to my giving him the EDN Engineer Extraordinaire award here.

He also has a bunch of equipment stashed away at a storage space. Here he is with his dad, showing off some of his “excess” equipment.

Alan also has a collection of Venable isolated network analyzers I told you about in a previous blog. Here is that picture again, with Alan in his Guy Fawkes costume as well as a snazzy carnival barker singing the praises the Venible (and Ridley) network analyzers.

And just to show Alan is the opposite of guys like Jim Williams, who had a messy bench and a neat home lab, here is a shot of Alan at work for a large semiconductor company that may be long on lawyers and short on permissions for me to publish pictures of their lab.