In this article we feature nine industry educators committed to passing on the knowledge and experience they’ve gained through years of experience in their fields. We’ve interviewed each to get a more in-depth picture of their stories so we could pass them on to you. We encourage you to meet our educators and hope that you connect with a few to take advantage of their vast wealth of knowledge over the year ahead.
Meet Educators Bill Kimmel, PE and Daryl Gerke, PE, Kimmel Gerke Associates, Ltd.
Forty-nine years as an electrical engineer. Past employers include Sperry Univac and Control Data Corporation. Co-founder of Kimmel Gerke Associates – part time in 1978, full time since 1987. Professionally involved with EMI/EMC since 1965. BSEE, University of Minnesota. Registered Professional Engineer (PE). NARTE Certified EMC Engineer.
Daryl Gerke, PE
Forty-three years as an electrical engineer. Past employers include Collins Radio, Sperry Univac, Tektronix, and Intel. Co-founder of Kimmel Gerke Associates – part time in 1978, full time since 1987. Professionally involved with EMI/EMC since 1970. BSEE, University of Nebraska. Registered Professional Engineer (PE). NARTE Certified EMC Engineer. FCC licenses (Commercial and Amateur Radio.)
ICM: What led to your commitment to becoming educators in your field?
Kimmel Gerke: We began moonlighting as technical instructors for a vocational school in 1975. Working together soon led to founding our consulting firm. In addition to teaching, we developed the curriculum for an adult evening electronics program. Later, under a state grant, we developed a one year certificate program for printed circuit board designers.
After going into full time EMC consulting, we decided to offer training classes to help our clients prevent problems at the design stage. At first, classes were only offered in-house, but since 1992 we have partnered with Tektronix on our public EMC design classes. Almost 20 years later, we have trained over 10,000 engineers and technicians in EMC design methods through our public and in-house classes.
We have found the educational aspects of our consulting practice to be very gratifying. Not only have we helped our fellow engineers do a better job, but we’ve helped improve products as well.
ICM: What do you hope attendees will leave your class having learned?
Kimmel Gerke: Our emphasis is on design and troubleshooting EMI/EMC issues, NOT on testing and regulations. We hope our students leave our classes with two things:
- A general understanding of EMI/EMC and how to design to prevent problems.
- A specific set of design guidelines that can be immediately applied (rules of thumb, checklists.)
Kimmel Gerke plans to offer the following classes and workshops in 2012. To learn more about their classes, visit their website at www.emiguru.com.
Design For EMC: Two days focused on how to “identify, prevent, and fix” common EMI/EMC problems. Includes over 40 “fixes”. Very practical with minimal math.
EMC Troubleshooting: One day workshop covering troubleshooting methods. Includes several interactive case studies. Only offered in February in two locations – Orlando and San Diego.
2012 Class Schedule
(Subject to change)
Current plans include six classes, which may expand if business conditions warrant.
February 2012: Orlando, FL and San Diego, CA (Includes optional troubleshooting workshop)
March 2012: Dallas, TX and Washington DC/Baltimore, MD
April 2012: Boston, MA and Syracuse, NY
Meet Educator Lee Hill, Founding Partner, Silent Solutions LLC
Lee: My first and only “real” job – I worked as a Principal EMC and Systems Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Workstation Systems Engineering Group (WSE) in Palo Alto, California. I was hired by the design team to assist with the design of new high speed desktop RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computers) workstations that at the time were used mostly by scientists and engineers. WSE was a very small, independent design organization composed of some of the best and brightest from Stanford University and the University of California- Berkeley.
Prior to California, I worked for Digital’s Low End Product Regulatory group in Massachusetts, where the company developed many different high volume, lower cost products like video displays, network adapters, small desktop and floor-standing computers, and almost every kind of peripheral, cable, and I/O you can imagine. The EMC engineering group trained us to be EMC consultants, who in order to be successful had to develop interpersonal skills and form effective business relationships with many, many different people and design groups within the company. At the time I was there, Digital had over 125,000 employees, which gave me additional opportunities to work with gifted engineers within many different product design and research groups around the world. Even back in the ‘80s I was able to correspond with technical colleagues via a mature intercompany email network, which today is taken for granted, but back then was a rarity except for the companies including Digital that developed the original Ethernet standard.
Both jobs gave me a terrific background in the design, troubleshooting, and retrofit of high speed electronic products. Today it would be difficult to duplicate even a fraction of this experience since the design process for many types of high volume consumer products is now conducted and managed offshore.
Lee earned his MSEE in Electromagnetics from Missouri University of Science and Technology (MS&T)
ICM: What led to your commitment to becoming an educator in your field?
Lee: While I was an EE undergraduate student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), I worked as an academic tutor in math and science for the Office of Special Services. I also worked as a tutor/counselor for an inner-city Federal program (Upward Bound) that promoted tutoring and on-campus activities with the goal of getting more inner-city youth interested in and successfully enrolled in higher education. Along with my childhood home near the city of Hartford, CT, this experience helped me develop skills and enjoy success in teaching a very diverse population, from the most privileged to the most needy.
My commitment to becoming an educator certainly originated from a family and cultural emphasis on education that was groomed by a few standout professors, most notably Dr. Paul Wilson at RIT, and of course my thesis advisor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (MS&T), Dr. Tom Van Doren. I earned my MSEE at MS&T under Tom’s guidance. He is the epitome of an ideal educator, he is kind, extremely competent, economical in his use of language, and is able to bridge academic concepts with real life education and technical demonstrations. His instructional materials reflect his ability to condense complex material into elegant, incredibly simple concepts and illustrations. Watching Tom teach has inspired me to never stop learning and developing new ways to teach and delight our class attendees. My commitment to education was also inspired by the excellent instruction I received from Dr. James Drewniak and Dr. Todd Hubing at MS&T. The 1990s were a very exciting time in EMC research and teaching, and MS&T was absolutely the best place on the planet to learn. Being surrounded by teaching excellence at MS&T cultivated my natural curiosity to learn and share that knowledge with others around the world.
ICM: What do you hope attendees will leave your class having learned?
Lee: I’d quibble and say that we don’t “hope” they learn, we want to be certain that students leave with a mastery of key concepts. We constantly change our material to find ways to elicit as many “ah hah!” moments as possible during a class. Then we survey every single student to find out what they loved about the class and also to get ideas about what we could improve or change.
What do we strive to have them learn – that’s easy – we have identified the most important EMC concepts that are left out of most undergraduate programs, specifically a) the noise model and how to use it for design and troubleshooting, b) physical self and mutual inductance, c) common-mode current d) Ground versus Return, e) antennas.
We expose our students to a strong base of equal amounts of theory, application, and examples so that they leave the class able to think for themselves and apply the information to new, future design and troubleshooting projects.
The best compliment that we often receive from past students is “Lee, we are already using your class information to solve noise problems, and now we don’t have to hire your company (SILENT), sorry about that!”.
Silent Solutions LLC will be offering the following classes in May and October 2012. Check www.silent-solutions.com for actual dates and registration information:
- Circuit to Circuit
- Design & Retrofit
- PCB Design
- Mechanical Design
- Spectrum Analyzer
Meet Educator Daniel D. Hoolihan, President, Hoolihan EMC Consulting
Dan: I have 42-years of experience in EMC Engineering. Two degrees in Physics – Bachelors and Masters. Work experience with Control Data Corporation, AMADOR Corporation, TUV SUD America, and Hoolihan EMC Consulting. Long-time IEEE member with Past-President credentials in the EMC Society. Chair of ANSI-ASC C63 (2012-2014).
ICM: What led to your commitment to becoming an educator in your field?
Dan: I have been teaching industrial seminars in EMC Engineering since 1970; I like to teach mature students who are interested in developing their capabilities in electrical engineering especially in the specialized area of “electromagnetic interference.”
ICM: What do you hope attendees will leave your class having learned?
Dan: I like to have the students leave with advanced knowledge of EMC engineering, an appreciation for the history of EMC engineering, and a burning desire to know more about EMC.
Dan currently has plans to offer the following classes in 2012:
I will be giving classes in conjunction with ETS‑Lindgren (in the Austin, Texas area) in 2012:
February 14 -16, 2012: Fundamentals of EMC Compliance Testing (includes “hands-on” laboratory testing as part of the course).
March 20-22, 2012: MIL-STD 461F (includes “hands-on” laboratory testing as part of the course).
May 22-24, 2012: Fundamentals of EMC Compliance Testing (includes “hands-on” laboratory testing as part of the course).
October 16-18, 2012: MIL-STD 461F (includes “hands-on” laboratory testing as part of the course).
The courses include short “guest” lectures on specialized topics by world-renowned engineers from ETS‑Lindgren.
Meet Educator Henry W. Ott, President/Principal Consultant, Henry Ott Consultants
Henry: After undergraduate school I went into the Air Force for four years, and was assigned to the Air Research and Development Command at Eglin AFB, Florida, where I was involved in flight-testing of armament systems on new aircraft. After the Air Force, I worked at Bell Labs in Whippany, NJ as a product design engineer. In 1963, I obtained my Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering. At Bell Labs I was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff and a consultant on EMC. In 1988, after 30 years at Bell Labs, I left to start Henry Ott Consultants, an EMC training and consulting organization.
While at Bell Labs, I wrote my first book “Noise Reduction Techniques in Electronic Systems,” which was published by John Wiley & Sons in 1976. A second edition of the book was published in 1988, just after I left Bell Labs, and remained in print until 2009. In 2009, my second book “Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering” was published also by John Wiley.
At Bell Labs, I was involved in designing sensitive low-level analog electronics that had to work in an electrically noisy environment. At this time, this was the mid 60s, I discovered that there was very little information available on dealing with noise and interference in electronics. The universities taught nothing about the subject, and there was very little literature available pertaining to the subject.
As a result I began to educate myself on the subject, which led to me teaching a course on the subject within Bell Labs. The course notes eventually led to the Noise Reduction Techniques book. The book got me known outside of Bell Labs and I began teaching continuing-education courses on the subject, on my own time, for various companies and organizations outside of Bell Labs. This eventually lead to my leaving Bell Labs and doing full-time EMC consulting and training.
My success has come from my ability to take a complex subject, such as EMC, and explain in it a simple understandable way both in person and in print. “Noise Reduction Techniques in Electronics Systems” has been referred to, by many as the “Bible on EMC.” My new book “Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering” received the “2009 PROSE Award,” from the Association of American Publishers for the most professional and scholarly book published that year in the category of Engineering and Technology.
The majority of the EMC training classes presented by Henry Ott Consultants are done in-plant for specific clients. However, I do try to offer at least two public EMC seminars each year. This allows engineers at companies that do not have enough people interested in EMC to justify an in-plant seminar to receive EMC training. These public seminars are usually offered in the spring and the fall, one in the eastern US, and one in the western US.
The 2012 spring public seminar will be held in Atlanta, GA area April 17-19.
The fall 2012 public seminar is not yet finalized, but Denver, CO area is being considered.
More information is available on the Henry Ott Consultants website (www.hottconsultants.com), both on the public and in-plant EMC courses.
These public offerings are 3-day EMC seminars directed towards electrical engineers. However, mechanical engineers, systems engineers, regulatory compliance engineers, technicians, and others who need a working knowledge of EMC principles will also benefit from these seminars. The participants obtain the knowledge necessary to design electronic equipment that is compatible with the electromagnetic environment, and in compliance with national and international EMC.
Meet Educator Donald L. Sweeney, President and Senior EMC Engineer, D.L.S. Electronic Systems, Inc.
ICM: What led to your commitment to becoming an educator in your field?
Don: As an engineer doing EMI/EMC testing for my employer, I was able to attend the IEEE EMC Symposiums. I felt a need to share what I was learning with other design engineers in my department, so I presented to them the information I had learned from the papers I had attended at the Symposium. When a fellow engineer would have a specific EMC problem, I would put together a few slides to show them how to design in a way that would avoid their problem.
I was pleasantly surprised when the University of Wisconsin asked me to present a night school class for engineers in the Milwaukie area. They had been contacted by a company who had heard about me and had suggested I teach a class there. I put together 10 weeks of lessons and we met every other Wednesday from 5:30 – 9:30 pm. We had 65 engineers and technicians attend the first semester, including 2 or 3 who drove up from the west side of the Chicago (about 100 miles each way), after they had all worked an 8 hour day. The average attendance was 62. It was such a pleasure to teach as everyone was so interested and wanted to learn about EMI/EMC. Shortly thereafter the university asked me to offer my class as a 3-day seminar.
A while later, I was asked to do an in-house series of classes for a large company that were held one Friday a month (payday so everyone was at work and in town) that lasted for two years. I eventually covered all the material I had, but since they wanted more, I kept generating new material.
I then began offering the classes locally in the Chicago area as a four-day seminar and students began attending from all over the world. The longer I taught, the more I had a growing need to help my students learn how to apply the EMC concepts to real life products, so in 2004 we began offering a hands-on workshop as part of the class to help tie together the concepts and practical applications.
The icing on the cake was added when we introduced the Product Reviews as an additional part of the class. The instructor(s), or one of their associates, discuss one-on-one with each student their own personal company project and how EMC can be improved. During the 45 minute review we are able to explain how EMC has been compromised using the terms and concepts we covered during the past three days. Even if the student does not have a product to discuss, we will talk about ideas they are considering and help in the planning stage. One student commented during his product review. “I would not understand what you are talking about had I not just taken your class. Now I see what we have been doing wrong.”
That sums up why I enjoy teaching others what I have learned over my more than 45 years in the electrical engineering and EMC design field. I personally believe by taking our current three-day seminar/workshop and taking advantage of the product review, a company has the potential of saving tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars by designing a product correctly from the beginning. For example, I once had a client at my test lab that would have saved $10,000 on the year’s production if they saved just “one penny” on each product they manufactured. Unfortunately very few “fixes” for a badly designed product can be added for a penny. Sometimes we can save a client (or potentially save a student) $10, $50 or even 100’s of dollars per product manufactured. Imagine what their savings would be over a year, or over several years of production, had they learned how to design their product with EMC in mind.
ICM: What do you hope attendees will leave your class having learned?
Don: When students leave this seminar/workshop, they should be ready to lead a design team with a high degree of confidence that their products will meet the EMC requirements.
The class is designed to teach concepts first, followed by the application of these concepts in a product. We begin by giving numerous examples of EMC problems that I’m familiar with, from the shutting down of nuclear power plants to a company designing a product using the wrong technology, requiring the power supply to be totally redesigned at a cost of about $500,000. We next discuss the various world regulations which must be met in order to market a product. Once students know why they need to understand EMC, they are next taught the very basics such as: Typical noise paths, Wave lengths, Grounding, Cabling and how shielding works, Passive components – how capacitors, inductors and even wires do not behave as ideal components.
We then discuss how electromagnetic fields radiate from wires and traces, and develop a strategy for designing our product to be a low emission system. We then go through each of the ways of minimizing emissions in our design, from the basic integrated circuit and how it influences emission, to the cabinet and how by using the correct material and the bonding of the joints, we create an RF tight system. We next cover filtering leads which might leave a system unshielded; then we troubleshoot a product which does not quite meet our EMC/ESD goal and see how to bring it into compliance.
During the last day we apply the concepts and equations by using a take-home software program developed by the instructors that will allow students to predict emissions based on quickly using a computer. Previously we’d been manually predicting emissions by using the equations developed in the textbook. We finally put this all together by meeting one-on-one with the student, applying the concepts just learned to their own product.
I strongly encourage all design engineers to take an EMC seminar/workshop so they can learn to evaluate their own products to avoid potential pitfalls.
Roger Swanberg is a Senior EMC Engineer at D.L.S. and teaches circuit board design. He is a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, with over 35 years in the electrical engineering field. He has worked for Motorola and Zenith in color TV design, Nuvatec Design Consulting as a consultant and EMC testing manager, US Robotics as an EMC designer and regulatory compliance manager, plus Motorola Lighting and Motorola Cellular as an EMC
and electronics designer. He is Vice-Chairman for the Chicago Section IEEE EMC Society.
Planned class schedule for 2012:
EMC By Your Design: A Practical Applications Seminar and Workshop
April 17-19, 2012 and October 23-25, 2012
Northbrook, IL
847-537-6400
www.dlsemc.com/1101
Meet Educator Dr. Tom Van Doren, President, Van Doren Company
President = “chief lackey”, Van Doren Company, my wife Lana is the real boss of the company. I have been happily married to my ‘angel’ for over 51 years!
ICM: What is your professional background?
Tom: I received BS, MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1962, 1963, and 1969 respectively. The main thing that I learned while obtaining the PhD degree was persistence will beat intelligence nearly every time. I served two years as a young second lieutenant with the US Army Security Agency from 1963-1965. While in the Army I realized how little I knew compared to the gray-haired senior sergeants. I worked for Collins Radio Company as a microwave engineer in Dallas, TX from 1965-1967.
During that time I was taught by some patient, experienced microwave engineers what inductance was and I discovered from some electrical safety engineers what electrical grounding was all about. I have been teaching the concepts of inductance and grounding in my short courses for the past 28 years. I never suspected then that I would become a multi-millionaire by teaching what I learned about those two concepts. I began my college teaching career with the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1969. During my first decade of teaching, I spent 9 summers in the 1970s working for the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, CA on advanced missile radar designs. There, I learned to combine my theoretical PhD education with the practical experience needed to make electronics work reliably over wide temperature and pressure ranges. On many occasions the experienced senior technicians gently “put me in my place” by showing me that I really didn’t know as much about engineering as I thought I did.
I am one of the founding members of the Missouri S&T EMC Laboratory. Currently, 8 US and 9 foreign corporations are sponsoring 23 different EMC related research projects at the EMC Laboratory. We have 26 graduate students, 5 research faculty, 5 tenured faculty and about $1.5M annual budget.
I have received two outstanding teacher awards from Missouri S&T, the Richard R. Stoddard award from the IEEE EMC Society for contributions to EMC technology and education, and I am a Life Fellow of the IEEE and Honored Life member of the EMC Society.
ICM: Why do you teach electromagnetic compatibility short courses?
Tom: In the early 1980s, I recognized that working engineers and technicians needed some help to diagnose and reduce their electrical interference problems. I developed a 2-day short course titled “Grounding and Shielding of Electronic Systems”. This course explained and demonstrated the key concepts involved with making equipment electromagnetically compatible. Even though I was a university faculty member who was familiar with complicated electromagnetic theory, in my short course I tried to explain the key concepts in a way that would be understood by and useful to design engineers and technicians. I must have succeeded because over the past 28 years more than 18,000 people from 110 companies and 15 countries have attended my short course presentations.
ICM: What do you hope attendees will leave your class having learned?
Tom:
- Treat an electrical signal as a current that requires careful routing of the outgoing and returning paths.
- Route a current such that the ‘geometrical’ centroid of its outgoing path is coincident with the ‘geometrical’ centroid of its return path.
- Every current, signal or noise, eventually returns to its source, not to ground.
- Sinusoidal steady-state currents take the path of least impedance, not least resistance.
- Self-inductance is a property of a complete current path, not a property of a single wire.
- The reasons for grounding are to reduce voltage differences that might cause an electrical safety problem or an electrical interference problem.
- A signal routing connection is intended to carry current, but a signal grounding connection should carry negligible signal current.
- Electrical noise problems can be predicted, diagnosed, and reduced by understanding the four electrical energy coupling mechanisms—conducted current coupling; magnetic field coupling; electric field coupling; and, electromagnetic wave coupling.
Open enrollment classes scheduled for 2012:
“Grounding & Shielding of Electronic Systems” (How to Diagnose and Solve Electromagnetic Interference and Signal Integrity Problems)
March 1-2 at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in Stillwater, OK.
Details about the course in Stillwater, OK can be found at http://gs-course.okstate.edu
March 28-29 at University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL).
Details about the course in St. Louis, MO can be found at http://dce.mst.edu/noncredit/facetoface/Grounding_and_Shielding_St_Louis.html
Meet Educator Dr. Steven H. Voldman, CEO/President, Dr. Steven H. Voldman LLC
Steven: My background is 25 years in semiconductor development at IBM, and also worked at Qimonda, TSMC, and Intersil. This includes 25 years of work in latchup development, and 20 years in the electrostatic discharge (ESD) field . I have been a member of the ESD Association for 20 years, where I have provided ESD tutorials in various fields. I have been a member of ESD Association workgroups for development of ESD standards. I am presently providing ESD consulting, latchup consulting, patent support, expert witness support, and teaching a variety of short courses.
ICM: What led to your commitment to becoming an educator in your field?
Steven: I am the first IEEE Fellow in the field of electrostatic discharge. I have provided tutorials at the ESD Symposium for many years including ESD circuits, ESD physics, I initiated the “ESD on Campus” program to bring lectures to universities students globally. I also teach short courses presently in many subjects in the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Taiwan, Israel, and Sri Lanka.
ICM: What do you hope attendees will leave your class having learned?
Steven: The attendees will learn many subjects from design and layout, circuits, design integration, failure mechanisms, to innovation.
Course Titles and Offerings for 2012:
- ESD physics
- ESD physics and devices
- ESD circuits
- ESD in radio frequency technologies
- ESD in Gallium Arsenide
- ESD Failure Mechanisms
- Latchup
- ESD design and synthesis
- ESD and latchup computer aided design
- Innovation, inventing and patenting
Meet Educator Kenneth Wyatt, Sr. EMC Engineer, Wyatt Technical Services, LLC
ICM: What led to your commitment to becoming an educator in your field?
Ken: I’ve always had a passion for teaching technical subjects to my peers and others in the field. I started writing for hobby and technical magazines while still in college (mid-1970s) and am convinced those published articles got my foot in the door for my first engineering job once I graduated. After I joined Hewlett-Packard, I took an EMC engineering course through a local university, based on Clayton Paul’s book, “Introduction to Electromagnetic Compatibility”. I was really fired up afterward and taught an internal course based on what I had learned. After Agilent Technologies spun-off from HP, I taught a weekly web-based course over a period of nine months to Agilent engineers worldwide. This eventually became a two-day Practical EMC Design seminar I taught throughout Agilent Technologies worldwide. Because I had developed this course on my own time, Agilent management supported my taking the course public. After I retired in 2008, I’ve had the opportunity to teach the course all around the country and really get a kick out of helping so many other companies with this “niche” subject.
ICM: What do you hope attendees will leave your class having learned?
Ken: My target audience – Analog, RF, Mechanical and Digital hardware design engineers will benefit from this course. A basic engineering background (BSEE or equivalent) is generally suggested. One thing that differentiates my seminars with others is that I try hard to teach the theory on a practical level, so that the essential basics are understood. I also include many interesting demonstrations of the concepts taught. The learning objectives for the participants include the ability to:
- Analyze, measure, troubleshoot and solve an EMC problem in more detail
- Understand theory from a more in-depth view and understand causes of the top EMC issues: radiated emissions and electrostatic discharge
- Make or purchase simple low-cost bench top troubleshooting tools
- Perform simple evaluation and pre-qualification tests to ensure likeliness of compliance
Class Schedule for 2012:
While I’m still developing my training schedule for 2012, the following course is available:
March 20-21, 2012
“EMC Essentials” – Design, Troubleshooting & Pre-Compliance Testing EMC Integrity, Longmont, CO (www.emcintegrity.com).
To register, call Vince at (303) 776-7249 or email: vinceg@emcintegrity.com
I’m still looking for host test labs on the east and west coasts, so check my web site early in January for the latest news (www.emc-seminars.com). 
