Employee Story丨How to transform from an "ultimate Frisbee" enthusiast to an ADI academician
A new “Radio Architecture and Design” blog series will debut soon in the Technical Support Forums, written by a team of wideband RF transceiver experts.
ADI Fellow Tony Montalvo will contribute the first post in a new series , sharing his technical and application knowledge on “Radio Architecture and Design” and giving you a “behind the scenes” peek. I had the pleasure of interviewing Tony to learn more about this new blog series, RF transceivers, and how he went from an “Ultimate Frisbee” enthusiast to a highly recognized ADI innovator.
I know you’re an ADI Fellow, which is pretty awesome. What does it mean to be a Fellow?
Tony Montalvo
: There are about 30 Fellows out of 9,000 employees, so being named a Fellow is a huge honor. I feel humbled to see my name listed among them, because some of the Fellows are pioneers in the industry and even absolute authorities. The core criteria are innovation and impact. That is, innovation must have impact, and the simplest indicator of impact is revenue.
Can you tell us a little bit about this new blog series?
Tony Montalvo
:
Our products bring some very sophisticated technology to applications that have traditionally been handled with discrete components. I thought customers might be interested in learning more about our radio philosophy, how we do it, and what the secrets are behind the scenes.
What inspired you to become an engineer?
Tony Montalvo : I don't have a "tear the TV into pieces when I was six" story. I was aimless for a long time until something grabbed me. As a kid, I was into skateboarding and punk rock. In college (Loyola University New Orleans), I studied physics, so I had a certain inclination toward technology. After college, I went to Columbia University in New York to get a master's degree because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I might have been an uninspired student when it came to solid-state physics, but I was a very capable player of Ultimate Frisbee.
Finally, a circuits class changed everything. Professor Yannis Tsividis would wiggle his fingers while describing circuits to show how voltage changes over time. For example, one finger would wiggle at the input of an inverting amplifier, while another finger would wiggle at the output with a larger amplitude and out of phase. Suddenly, everything became clear, and the wiggling fingers made me who I was.
Please talk about your experiences after graduating from graduate school and how you joined Analog Devices.
Tony Montalvo
:
After getting my master's degree in electrical engineering, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work as a flash memory designer at AMD. This was the first generation of flash memory, and it was fertile ground for a budding analog circuit designer. We had to figure out things like how to generate the programming and erase voltages to maximize the life of the memory cell. It was rewarding work, but I realized that once the basic problems were solved, the rest was repetitive work. After four years, I left AMD to pursue a Ph.D. at North Carolina State University. My Ph.D. thesis was on artificial neural network chips that learned by example, with "synaptic" weights stored on floating gates, the same idea as flash memory cells. It was great, and the work worked, but it was ahead of the market and never got adopted. Now, almost 20 years later, neural networks are hot again, at the heart of many speech recognition systems like Siri.
After I got my PhD, I joined Ericsson in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, as an RF chip designer. I knew almost nothing about RF at this point. Fortunately, they were growing very fast and the barriers to entry were very low. Ericsson was a great learning experience for me. I was surrounded by radio experts and immersed in knowledge. My big hit was a receiver IF chip that didn't require a bulky second IF filter. Some of the most experienced RF people in the world told me it was impossible and "would never work." However, it did work, and millions of these chips are used in Ericsson phones. I learned that if no one says a product "will never work," then I'm probably not working hard enough.
Although I learned a lot at Ericsson, it became clear that I would have a better position as an IC designer at a semiconductor company. I left Ericsson after five years and joined Analog Devices in 2000.
I recently learned that your office is on the NC State University campus. How is that possible?
Tony Montalvo
:
I opened the ADI office in Raleigh. I was a graduate of NC State and an adjunct professor there, so I chose to locate the office on campus. Mind you, this was in 2000 and the market was booming. Shortly after I signed the lease, the boom died and I was left alone. It was a bit unpleasant, but fortunately the company was patient and we slowly grew.
As an adjunct professor, I taught an RF chip design course every other semester for many years. This was an invaluable experience for me for several reasons. First, to teach something, you have to understand it very deeply. Second, my communication skills improved greatly, which is very useful when dealing with clients. Finally, I hired some of the best students!
What interests you in the field of RF transceivers?
Tony Montalvo
:
The first is the impact.
Everybody is connected to wireless communications now, and if we can do something to improve people's experience, it's easy to see.
The second is that this is an industry that is changing rapidly.
For example, it wasn't that long ago that voice was the killer app for mobile phones, and coverage was spotty at best. Now, just a few years later, you have all the knowledge ever created accessible to you from the smartphone in your pocket. And this is far from the end. It's getting faster and faster, and that's the fun of it.
As an engineer, you have had many successes and failures. Please share an example with our readers .
Tony Montalvo
:
I usually make products that work, but I can't guarantee success. I've had a few products that were technically successful but commercially failed. I've learned that
the most important thing is to find something worth building.
Once you find a worthwhile problem, good engineers can find clever solutions. I'll talk about this in my blog.
What advice do you have for tackling daunting projects?
Tony Montalvo
:
If you don't start, you'll never finish. If starting isn't intimidating, you're not working hard enough.
What book are you reading lately?
Tony Montalvo
:
I just finished reading Oliver Sacks' autobiography, On the Move. He was an accomplished neuroscientist who was passionate about bringing complex subjects to the masses. For example, Robin Williams' film, The Silence of the Gods, was based on his work. What I really resonated with him was his early years. He was a wanderer who had no plans for his life. He just did what interested him and what he felt comfortable with. I've been through that, too.
After reading Tony Montalvo's experience, what do you want to say? Welcome to leave your comments in the comment area. Meanwhile, let's look forward to the first article of the mysterious "RF Transceiver Series Blog"~
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