Tales From the Cube

Mysterious data errors
By Ron Tipton, TDL Technology Inc, 12/18/2008
Tales From The Cube: Input of 12 sequential 1s causes a data-collection system to output garbled data. This looks like a job for 12-gauge AWG wire.

All analog, all the time
By Jim Delmonico, General Electric, 12/5/2008
Tales From The Cube: A young engineer enamored with the simple, deterministic nature of digital design soon learns that everything, at some level, is analog.

All fail down: ESD-induced failures lead to a logical trap
By Larry Baxter, Capsense.com, 11/27/2008
Tales From The Cube: When terminals in low-humidity cities fail, it's not hard to finger ESD as the cause. Figuring out the fix turns out to be more of a challenge, especially when engineers assume a single design change should do the trick.
Align up: The case of the out-of-sync synchro amps
By Arnold N Simonsen, Electrical Engineer, 11/13/2008
Tales From The Cube: An Apollo-program engineers struggles to straighten out a system that suffers from repeated misalignment of antenna synchro amplifiers.
Stick to the schematic
By Barry Harvey, Intersil Inc, 10/30/2008
Tales From The Cube: How do you get a 1.6-GHz oscillation from a 1.2-GHz part? When you assigned an intern to build your circuit.
Repeat offender
By Glen Chenier, Teeter Totter Tree Stuff, 10/16/2008
Tales From The Cube: A T1 multiplexer generates an unrecognizable waveform when driving a new repeater. The repeater vendor repeatedly swears nothing is wrong, and the boss is getting anxious.
Good as gold
By Thomas Black, Digital Products Company, 10/2/2008
Tales From The Cube: When a vendor obsoletes a critical ADC, a system designer finds himself becoming an IC-packaging expert—and learns not to skimp on bond wires.
Passive part becomes aggressive
By Craig Hermann, Engineer, 9/18/2008
Tales From The Cube: A compterized phone-answering system works but fails diagnostic tests, while its 'backup' passes the tests but won't work. The engineer tasked with resolving the conundrum eventually corners a surprising villain.
The case of the stolen capacitor
By Glen Chenier, Teeter Totter Tree Stuff, 9/4/2008
Tales From The Cube: An engineering change order erases a design's input stabilizing capacitance, with costly results.
It’s an electromagnetic-mechanical world
By David R Bryce, Dataram Corp, 8/21/2008
Tales From The Cube: A father's lesson helps to reveal the culprit causing a noise spike in a magnetic pickup.
Dumping the noise
By Jim Christensen, Kris Design Services, 8/7/2008
Tales From The Cube: Tabletop rap elicits a puzzling click from a solid-state ultrasonic receiver design.
Ghost busting on the ocean floor
By Hugh Shane Mitre, 7/24/2008
Tales From The Cube: Spurious images in a side-scan sonar system lead to a further mystery: Why did it take so long for someone to try putting the unit into self-test mode?
Too many cooks spoil the circuit description
By Steve Lubs, Department of Defense, 7/10/2008
Tales From The Cube: It started out as a simple design idea describing a receiver for a TDM data stream. Then my boss got involved. And his boss. And his boss.
Theory of relativity visits “real-time” clock
By Vadim Demidov, Giesecke & Devrient, 6/26/2008
TALES FROM THE CUBE: What would make a logic analyzer's internal clock run faster than real time, but only while being set?
One giant leap for “enhanced” hybrid
By Stephen Tomporowski, Kaman Measuring Systems, 6/12/2008
Tales From The Cube: Space-bound product nearly fails to launch due to an "improved" circuit design that is anything but.
Temperature: Your worst enemy?
By Clark Robbins, GS Engineering, 5/29/2008
Tales From The Cube: Temperature-induced system errors gave this design team cold sweats. After realizing that identical units were failing at different temperatures, the engineers learned a valuable lesson.
Laser goes to (trim) pot
By Glen Chenier, Teeter Totter Tree Stuff, 5/14/2008
Tales From The Cube: The laser in a SONET transponder begins to behave erratically with varying temperature. Should the engineers blame the climate, or the human element?
Watch those power leads!
By Doug Marsh, Consultant, 4/25/2008
Tales From The Cube: Accidental backward filter test proves detrimental to DIPs.
Finding clock glitches
By Glen Chenier, Consultant, 4/17/2008
Tales From The Cube: Debugging this optical backplane problem required a sharp eye and a darkened room.
Semiconductor contamination: Not your usual suspects
By Martin DeLateur, Consultant, 4/2/2008
Tales From The Cube: Heavy-metal contamination is clearly the culprit in a recurrent case of decreasing semiconductor yield. But where is it coming from?
The case of the 'bad' memory chip
By Pierre Renaud, Hardware Engineer, 3/20/2008
Tales From The Cube: Is this switch failure due to bad hardware, or a previously dormant software bug?
Power, power everywhere but nary a watt to blink
By Walter Lindenbach, 2/27/2008
Tales From The Cube: Clever design takes 550V-ac oil pumps offline to avert environmental disaster.
A helping hand: 64-bit counter design pays off, slowly
By Steve Lubs, Department of Defense, 2/21/2008
Tales From The Cube: My boss didn't like my 64-bit counter design, but by sharing it as an EDN Design Idea I helped a fellow engineer.
The stalling power supply
By William Saks, Northrop Grumman, 2/7/2008
Tales From The Cube: A test technician's unexpected toggling reveals the design flaw behind a power-supply failure.
Blown fuse has a meltdown
By Jim Sylivant, Engineering Consultant, 1/17/2008
Tales From The Cube: Unusual construction gives fuse a "memory" for brief current surges.
Surprise, surprise: Intermittent power-on reset problem reveals decades-old secret of 8052
By Phil Ouellette, Mettler-Toledo Inc, 12/14/2007
Debugging a problem with a USB peripheral leads to the discovery of a little-known quirk of the venerable 8052 processor.
Mind the gap: What separates a failing transformer-isolated interface from a flawless protoype?
By Jeff Fries, GE Transportation, 12/3/2007
Tales From The Cube: Do your qualification testing on a design that best represents what will come off the actual production line.
What color is 10 kΩ?
By John Linstrom, S&K Electronics and Sunspot, 11/8/2007
Tales From The Cube: A code held the key to building a board with the right resistors.
Outdoors-only LCD malfunction puzzles portable-product designers
By Chris Lee, Cheshire Engineering Corp, 10/25/2007
Tales From The Cube: Chips and software don't always just snap together and work, and your engineering education began with basic science for a reason.
Time bomb: The case of the invisible failure mode
By Walter Lindenbach, Calgary Controls Ltd, 9/27/2007
Tales From The Cube: An unexpected voltage spike compromises a monitoring device's reliability.

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In EDN's Tales From The Cube, engineers relate their most vexing design challenges— and how they conquered them. From the cubicle to the test bench to the field, hear how your peers solve real-world problems.

What's your story? If we publish it, you'll receive $200. (Target word count: 700.)

EDN gratefully acknowledges the contributions of all the engineers who share their stories here.

We also thank illustrator Daniel Vasconcellos, who delivers on short notice and adds an oft-needed note of levity.

Tales From the Cube

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