Category: Interviews

Going from an engineer into a leadership role is anything but straightforward. The biggest challenge for technical minds, according to High Tech Institute trainer Jaco Friedrich, is to align and influence diverse and multidisciplined stakeholders – all from a position without power. To Friedrich, generating this buy-in doesn’t only come from your technical expertise, but from proper positioning, strong leadership skills and good communication.

 

You’ve finally done it. After years of working your way up from junior to senior engineer and architect, now you’re ready to take on a leadership role. This is your chance to show the company that you’ve got what it takes to assume the wheel and drive a team to success. With all the technical knowledge you’ve gained through your experience, you’ve pretty much seen it all and are quite advanced to less-experienced team members. This transition should be a breeze, right? According to Jaco Friedrich, a former architect and team lead turned trainer, establishing your technical credibility can be a big help, but it’s your leadership skills that will bring you to the next step in your career development.

“Spending years working my way up through the different levels of engineering and then to group leader, I’ve experienced first-hand the difficulties and the pitfalls of making the jump to a leadership role,” recalls Friedrich, a training expert at High Tech Institute. While the high-tech domain is filled with some of the brightest technical minds, for many, it’s the non-technical soft skills of interaction and communication that are lacking. “It took me years of training and education to really understand those difficulties, which is why I use my time to share what I’ve learned with the engineers of today. Sometimes, you can best teach that which you most needed to learn in your own personal development. I think that’s definitely the case for me.”

For the last 20 years, Friedrich has put his focus into teaching and helping engineers grow into leadership roles. He has trained thousands of engineers and architects, in the Netherlands and abroad, to learn the skills he wished he possessed early in his career. This includes his High Tech Institute’s two-day training “Leadership skills for architects and other technical leaders.”

Check out his training

Call your bluff

In his experience as a trainer in high tech, Friedrich notices that engineers have two main challenges, or dilemmas, to overcome when moving into leadership. The first is that leaders are expected to plan or take a specific direction earlier in the process, which means making big decisions with only a limited amount of information and clarity. “What I see is that engineers are very technical at heart. They might be 80 percent comfortable and have an idea of the way to go, but they hesitate because making big decisions without 100 percent certainty can feel daunting,” suggests Friedrich. “The problem is, someone else in the group might only understand 30 percent but be much more vocal, and this often leads to the project being steered in the wrong direction.”

The solution, Friedrich says, is not to be afraid to take a position, even if you’re not fully certain. Instead, start by conveying what you know and pointing out the potential risks. This invites everyone into a dialog and allows the group to assess risks and rewards.

“You never want to be fake in these situations. Your colleagues will call your bluff and certainly won’t buy into what you’re saying,” explains Friedrich. “In this scenario, it’s really about positioning yourself and being open from the start. Being a leader means you’ll find yourself no longer in the world of science but in the world of risk management. It’s a real mind shift that has to take place.”

Trainer Jaco Friedrich.

'To really make the jump to become a leader, you have to find ways to create headspace.'

 

Headspace

The second dilemma, according to Friedrich, is finding the right balance between the engineer’s mentality of finding solutions on your own and finding ways to delegate responsibilities to keep a broad view of a project and its stakeholders. “This is one of the more difficult shifts for engineers going into leadership roles. They still want to work like they always have but can lose sight of all the moving parts and pieces,” illustrates Friedrich. “To really make the jump to become a leader, you have to find ways to create headspace. This means you must learn to delegate tasks to others and then help by coaching them through the process.”

Friedrich points out that while your technical knowledge is a great asset to help guide these situations, coaching relies more heavily on patience, communication and an entire set of soft skills. “To be effective as a leader, you’ll need to find a way to really develop skills in diplomacy and influence to gain buy-in from the various stakeholders,” he reveals. “Teams today are extremely diverse in terms of culture and discipline. To get all the stakeholders on board with the direction you’re steering means knowing how to appeal to them and motivate them from a position without power. Formal power can be effective, but it’s certainly not a motivating force.”

Resistance

Of course, no matter how sharp your influencing skills are, it’s not always possible to win everyone over. When you’re working with diverse groups of highly intelligent, highly technical people, you’ll most certainly run into different levels of resistance. Learning to deal with this resistance is crucial to being successful in a leadership role – and is one of the focal points of Friedrich’s training.

“Something that a lot of engineers struggle with is how to turn resistance into positive momentum. In our trainings, participants are always stumped to learn that as much as 50 percent of that resistance actually stems from themselves,” teases Friedrich. “It typically comes from one’s inability to present information, options and consequences in a clear and meaningful manner. We teach some simple tactics for new leaders to maneuver themselves into a position of strength and clarity from the start. That way, they can avoid wasting time getting the ball rolling. Of course, there’s still the other 50 percent, but to learn that you’ll have to come to the course.”

 

This article is written by Collin Arocho, tech editor of Bits&Chips. Trainer Jaco Friedrich. 

How does a project leader cope with busy bosses, square techies with big egos, system architects and lonesome inventors? In the tech world, this is made easier by the common rule set of physics that everybody agrees to, according to Wilhelm Claussen. He also shines some light on his project leadership course at High Tech Institute.

Wilhelm Claussen can tell you everything about what it means to be a project leader and how to get to success with your team. But there are more angles to project leadership. You also have to ‘influence without power’: keep higher management involved and stay connected to peers like system architects. Project leaders have to be aligned to stay on the right track.

Starting with the upper layers, Claussen immediately dims high expectations. “Having been in higher management positions, I can tell you that there you have very limited insight in the projects that are running, as you’re constantly being tossed around by the various calamities.” That’s why it’s crucial that project leaders understand how they communicate upwards, he says. “You need to do that in a way that people above you can hear and understand you. It’s the first step to be helped.”

Claussen points out that it’s extremely important to have a relationship with your project sponsor or customer. “That of course builds over time. The question then should be: how do you build this relation? Communicating with management follows the same rules as communicating with your team. The main point is: be consistent in your communication. In short, for management, you must come across as straight and reliable. And you have to achieve, but that’s the name of the game.”

As a mandatory prerequisite for consistent communication upwards, Claussen mentions that the project leader himself needs to be aware of the actual project progress. “You have to honestly answer the question: am I on track or am I not on track? You shouldn’t accept bad quality in your project, just for the sake of ticking off a box in time, because this is going to haunt you. Better limit the number of boxes to be ticked in the beginning, by using a smart project setup. Otherwise, this is going to fall back on you much, much later. It’s pretty much like the statement accounted to US president Eisenhower: ‘No one has time to do it right the first time, but everybody has time to take a second look and do it over again.’”

 

What if problems arise or things really go wrong?

“Then you need to be clear and communicate bad news to the management and sponsors above you. And you must take painful decisions, in a courageous and well-balanced way, as early as possible. People have the strange tendency to close their eyes and avoid a bold decision because they might be wrong or they’re afraid of the consequences. But with every delay, you’re driving further to the cliff.”

“A very funny Roman saying goes: it’s better to be the fool of all the people than to postpone a decision because you’re afraid of becoming a fool. Yes, decisions can be wrong. Did I make the wrong decisions? Of course. But the moment you recognize that you made a wrong decision, and if you have a good track record in your project team, you can stand in front of the group and say: ‘Sorry folks, the last four weeks, we were marching in the wrong direction. By the way, yesterday evening I recognized that. This is why we’re changing today. We’re now heading for that direction.’ If you have a good team, they’ll turn with you as one man.”

After getting some headwind…

“Not at that moment, if you’re working with professionals. The worst will come next Christmas party because then everybody will make jokes about you, but that’s the price you have to pay.”

Trainer Wilhelm Claussen. Photo by Fotogen Fotostudio.

Other rules?

“Similar to the communication with your project team. Like being extra careful with silence. If you don’t hear anything from a particular stakeholder, project sponsor or supplier, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good news.”

 

Do you have experience with that?

“You call it experience, I call it failure. I remember our team in Korea was waiting for a turbo booster pump shipped from our parent company as the critical delivery to the production start of a newly built factory. The agreed delivery date came and we all went to the airport to pick it up. But when the airplane landed and the hatch opened, we were staring into an almost empty cargo compartment. No pump. Only then, when I furiously called my sponsors, they told me it would arrive three weeks later as they had rerouted the device scheduled for us to some other construction site. And of course, the sponsors did know about that issue earlier but failed to communicate that. So, when the project part – in this case, my superiors – doesn’t inform you about flaws ahead of time, it deprives you of all options to counteract. That’s why you have to act yourself if you don’t hear anything.”

Does that require a specific character?

“I’ve seen lots of different characters that were good project leaders. I don’t think a specific personality is required. Of course, you have to like dealing with the unexpected and making things work. But the weak spots that arise in projects are always pretty much alike and rarely related to the character of the project leader alone. It’s usually a sequence of events that leads the project into the ditch. Failure is also a team effort. The good news is that you can learn to prevent it. If you keep an eye on those essentials and develop a sensitivity for your blind spots, you can make sure that your project has a much bigger chance of success, regardless of the chosen method or methodology or your personal character. That’s also what I transmit in my course at High Tech Institute.”

In high-tech companies, project leaders operate very close to system architects. What’s their relation and how do their tasks differ?

“For me, system architects are the caretakers and wardens of the functional integrity of the system throughout all levels. The project leader is the person that concerts, aligns and coordinates the work along a timeline to make the functions of the system available to the customer. I have very good experience in dealing with system architects. The project leader will provide them with the environment for decision-making, for example with discussions in change control boards, supporting and structuring their requests and allowing them to process their input according to an agreed rule set. The technical decisions I basically leave to them: which functions or features to include or exclude. But I hold them accountable for the technical content, for following the rules and for proper alignment. No lonesome cowboys!”

Can you tell a bit more about the interaction with architects? Presumably, there can be heated discussions sometimes.

“For sure, there can be heated discussions. It’s important to manage these people as well as the technical subjects in a well-balanced manner. Let me give you an example. I once had an issue with one of my piping architects. Through a lonesome design change, he managed to increase the amount of excess heat that had to be removed from the system literally overnight by almost 30 percent. When I challenged him on this in the team meeting, he basically replied: ‘I’ve done that because it’s necessary; you wouldn’t understand anyway.’ At that moment, the communication went completely out of control. I intended to make him explain his measures to the other architects and follow the agreed rule set for alignment. He understood this as ‘this guy is challenging my expertise’ and in return challenged my position as project manager.”

How did you resolve the miscommunication?

“Well, this is the funny part. First, I was about to jump on him, but fortunately, the miscommunication became clear to me just before I did. I started laughing, and after my explanation, he cheered up as well. He then wrote a note to his colleagues, giving the details of and the reasoning behind his design change. In the CCB meeting the following Friday, he got consent from all stakeholders in the project – for a good contribution that had almost ended in a bitter fight.”

Photo by Fotogen Fotostudio.

In technical environments, some people are more square than others. Is that a challenge for a project leader?

“I don’t think so. We’re privileged to work on technical stuff with other educated people. At the end of the day, we have an objective rule set that everybody agrees to and that’s called physics. As long as everybody agrees to this rule set, you’ll always have an objective way to settle a technical dispute in a development project. Sometimes, of course, it can bend a bit left and right before finally coming to a conclusion. We’re blessed that there are no alternative facts for physics. Or to cite the Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman before US Congress when NASA tried to cover up the Challenger disaster: ‘Physics doesn’t care about marketing.’”

Do projects in the high-tech region around Eindhoven differ from an environment like the automotive industry in Germany?

“I think they’re both high-tech, highly integrated, both are hardware driven with a strong software component. From that perspective, they’re relatively comparable. In general, the major differentiator is between realization projects and development projects. In a realization project, you usually have a clearly defined achievable goal, a lot of manufacturing people who are used to following orders and performing tasks in a structured way – you ‘just’ need to get it done in time. Development environments are more interesting. There, the path to success is less clear and even the goal is sometimes uncertain. And you’re dealing with developers, usually very intelligent individuals, who perceive themselves as hidden geniuses – some of them really are. In this case, the leadership challenge is to include them all in the common goal. For that, you have to lead them, guide them, motivate them to deliver a concerted action.”

 

Some of them will work on a new functionality every day if they have the chance.

“And if they do, you have to cope with it constructively. By asking yourself: is this benefiting my customer, is this fitting into the integration? You actually have to foster this in the early development phase. Because this is your only chance to make a product that’s different from what’s already existing.”

But you have to be very careful with that?

“Yes, I can fully subscribe to that. You must balance it in a structured way. I always rely on the technical experts and architects in my team. They make a balanced and structured assessment of this new idea to incorporate it, yes or no.”

Your new course at High Tech Institute is focused on project leadership, not on project management.

“The reason to focus on project leadership is that project leadership is the art to influence the pace, focus and goal of the project. Along the way, you provide guidance and insight to the team. You have to be the man on deck – that’s what project leadership is about. Project management is the set of means and methods to have a transparent, clear and structured communication and framework. It’s a kind of a basic condition.”

You teach this course in one day. What do participants take away?

“I don’t like the word ‘teaching’ when it comes to leadership. This course is designed for people who already have project management and project leadership experience. I prefer to say that I’m sharing the essentials I’ve gained over the last twenty years in high-tech project management. Participants will be taking away a fresh and independent view on how to manage their projects better, by focusing on a few aspects to make sure that they’re followed. It’s not a project controlling course. The key to success is to not lose the overview and I show how to keep that overview in a complex and fast-changing environment.”

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips. Trainer Wilhelm Claussen. Photo by Fotogen Fotostudio.

Dynamics plays a key role in overall system performance. Design choices can have severe consequences. Therefore, it is important to choose the right direction from the start and to substantiate the concept with modelling techniques. “You have to take into account all your forces and interferences, and position the sensors and actuators correctly. Trainers Dick Laro and Adrian Rankers ellaborate about their Dynamics and modelling training.

With each successive generation, the bar for high-tech machines is raised. The new system should move faster or more precise. Design choices from the original development process might turn out to be unfortunate. Eigenfrequencies and vibrations, which were still negligible in the first machine, suddenly put a spanner in the works. At an precision requirement level of typically around ten micrometers, it becomes a real challenge to keep the dynamics of the system under control with standard design rules.

Designers may still know dynamics theory from school, may even have done some calculations, but they often lack the know-how to translate that knowledge into their current physical machine design. “How does the dynamics relate to errors in the system and to the stability problems in your control loop? How do you model that? And how can you then use those models to achieve a better system?”, says Dick Laro, system architect at MI-Partners and teacher at High Tech Institute. During the training ‘Dynamics and modelling’ (DAM), students receive answers to these questions. “We make the link between theory and practice, and between the various subdisciplines. How does the dynamics interact with control technology? And how does the mechatronic design fit in that picture?”

Laro and co-teacher Adrian Rankers use the practice of starting small and simple, and expand later. “I always begin with a bottle on a rubber band – a very basic mass spring system”, says Rankers. “If you understand the basic dynamics of this, you are already well on your way. Then, you have to understand how to describe vibrations of more complex objects.” He takes a sheet of paper, starts bending and twisting it, and says: “There are all kinds of mode shapes in this; shapes that you can describe using modal analyses. In order to design a stable system, you have to understand it, see that one point moves faster than another and that there are even points that move in the opposite direction. This has consequences for the actuator and sensor location, among other things.”

Interferences

According to Rankers, there are two reasons why it is so important to understand all those mode shapes down to the last detail. “One side of the story is that vibrations lead to accelerations and thus to forces. They can seriously hamper your control. Moreover, when two connected parts move with each other, a force is transferred. But that transfer is never 100 percent; there is always some distortion in those parts, certainly at the micrometer and nanometer level.”

“The other side is that in all systems you have to cope with interfering forces,” Rankers continues. Think cables that keep vibrating, friction, all kinds of forces from the process and of course external disturbances such as floor vibrations and acoustic excitation. You have to take all those forces into account. “And every force has a counterforce. A stage pushes against a machine frame that gives back a reaction force. After a while, the two of them are shaking happily.”

When you know all those disruptive forces, you want to control them. “With an expensive measuring system you can accurately determine the relative position of objects. Then you try to straighten things out with corrective forces,” explains Rankers. “You want to do that with a frequency as high possible, and as rigidly as possible. That means a high bandwidth in your control loop. Then you have a stiff coupling between those two objects. However, there are limits that are determined, among other things, by instability in the control loop. And it is precisely those vibrations that can make control loops unstable.”

Magic words

The ultimate goal is to provide insight into all vibrations in a system. “From modal theory you can describe all complex mechanical systems as a sum of a mass-spring systems,” says Laro. “Some have a phase that matches, others move in the opposite direction, making the dynamics more difficult. Still, you can build the larger system from easier-to-understand subsystems. We explain how you do that in the course.”

Dick Laro.

FEM tools are perfectly capable of calculating the modes of those subsystems. “That’s nice, but you don’t design a machine based on mode shapes,” warns Laro. “It is certainly not obvious how to link those sub-results back together. How does that mode shape relate to a transfer function and a system error? How do the mode shape and the eigenfrequency relate to the bandwidth? And more practically, where should I place my sensor and actuator to be able to suppress that one disturbing mode?”

Rankers answers the last question: “It will probably sound as a no-brainer that it is a good plan to drive a system at the center of mass. But that isn’t always an option. Perhaps there is an optical element in the way and you have to let the force apply to one of the corners. Is that okay as well and what is the effect on overall system stability? And where will you measure? Perhaps diagonally opposite might be best because you are close to the point of interest there, for example close to the wafer. Then you do not necessarily measure at the place where you actuate the system, so you are confronted with all kinds of modes that increase the chance of instability.”

Adrian Rankers.

“You will need to model the system in order to estimate whether or not your design choices are allowed,” Rankers continues. During the High Tech Institute’s ‘Dynamics and modelling’ training, participants experiment hands-on in the 20-Sim simulation package. Laro: “How bad is it if I don’t actuate in the center of mass but an inch off? How far can you go and what happens if you go too far? Modeling and evaluation, those are the magic words, because it is very easy to mess things up.”

Rankers again: “You always start with a list of requirements and wishes, nothing more. Then you need to carefully consider what the right choices are and what you can better avoid. In that respect, it is a knockout race. Because you understand what happens in the dynamics and how you can correct for any disruptive forces, you can make a good assessment at an early stage. Some ideas look better than others, so go with those. In 2D, in 3D, until you get to the finite element analysis. That is why you optimize the system, but you can’t solve choices with it that are fundamentally wrong. On a conceptual level, your design has to be good.”

Four essential tips

1. No component is infinitely stiff. A block of metal and even a chunk of granite have internal mode shapes and can deform. A rule of thumb is that if you want to achieve a bandwidth of 200 Hz in your control loop, all other vibrations – including the internal ones – must have a higher frequency by a factor of 10.
2. A guide does not have infinite stiffness either. In any case, you don’t want to rely on that stiffness at all. In a linear system this means that you want to actuate in the center of mass. Actuate the part so that it does exactly what you want even in the absence of that guidance.
3. Think about the mass proportions. In the CD-actuator, for example, that turned out to be a nightmare. In the first generation everything was bulky and there was no problem, but in later generations there was a considerable challenge because the mass of the part that had to move aproached the mass of the ‘fixed’ world.
4. Be aware of the reaction forces. The force you use to drive the stage, for example, always has a counter force. That force goes to the machine frame and probably also to the sensor block that is attached to it. In short, you excite the sensor block through the reaction force. And a vibration of the sensor block can be seen in the sensor signal just as well as when the stage moves. So you have to include the full reaction path.

This article is written by Alexander Pil, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

We’re working in the age of integration, where lonesome inventors can only make an impact with a good team. In this second interview, Wilhelm Claussen, project leadership trainer at High Tech Institute, talks about the changing environment of system integration, how cultural diversity benefits project teams and the challenge he specifically sees for the Dutch.

When Wilhelm Claussen told his brother ten years ago that he was going to ramp up a manufacturing site in the Netherlands, he got laughed in his face. At that time, his brother ran a factory for building specialty machines in Germany, employing several hundred. His advice was: never manufacture in the Netherlands; you’ll only get individual parts made by individuals and sometimes they may even work.

“The general perception of Germans being more process oriented and disciplined and the Dutch being more chaotic and more creative has some truth in it,” Claussen admits when asked about the impact of cultural differences in projects. “I always appreciate working with Dutch people. They’re more daring, more inclined to look for opportunities, rather than coming up with reasons why something can’t work.”

Project leaders can benefit from both, Claussen argues, but you need to balance them. “Especially in development projects, you immediately recognize that there’s a certain period when you need to embrace change. In the beginning, you need creativity and you want to foster a positive drive for new ideas. Later on in a project, there of course comes a time when you need to make sure that you’re going ahead in a structured way.”

Trainer Wilhelm Claussen. Photo by Fotogen Fotostudio.

Can this chaotic behavior of the Dutch be a hindrance in projects?

“I wouldn’t say a hindrance. Wherever in the world you want to be successful in whatever project, you must always accept that the people in your team are the best people you can have at that moment. You have a goal, and you need to perform. The challenge is to get people moving in the same direction with the same pace, with the same sense of quality and with the same objective. That’s what you need to get going. For that, you need to utilize the cultural differences to make sure that the right person is in the right place in your project.”

So what did your brother not see?

“First of all, I think he was just nurturing his stereotype that Dutch are never able to run straight on a straight line. In that particular case, I was establishing a manufacturing process and that has always its own challenges. To get things done, you need to find the right contributor for each spot. That’s the same anywhere in the world. The bottom line is that our team succeeded, got the products out, outpaced all competition and were first on the market.”

But there’s an increasing challenge for the ‘Dutch way of working,’ Claussen warns. “When we look at current innovation processes in technology, most are combinations of known things. To make an innovation work in a product that’s useful for a customer, it needs to obey and follow a lot of already established interfaces because most of the time, we aren’t innovating, we’re mainly neatly integrating things.”

This is the age of integration?

“I think that’s exactly what we should call it, the age of integration. Even a fundamentally new invention needs to connect to a lot of interfaces and obey rules before it becomes useful for the customer. That means that you have to maintain a lot of discipline and structure before you’re actually rewarded with the benefits of new contributions.”

Why is that so difficult?

“Because it means that nobody can be an individual inventor anymore. Besides having a brilliant idea, which remains an individual act of creativity, the inventor needs to collaborate with a team of various people and disciplines to make the invention work. Every contribution nowadays is blending into an architecture with existing interfaces. That means the mandatory prerequisite for obtaining a working system is to understand how all the blocks or elements are working synergetically together with your new functionality, solution, idea or concept. For example, the first cars were made by only a few persons, visionary but lonesome inventors and investors. If you now look at a Daf truck, you see a system with a huge number of complex elements with interfaces that you must adhere to and operate with flawlessly. Lonesome inventors just can’t excel on their own anymore.”

And all basic elements are more or less invented?

“Certainly not. If you say that, you’re underestimating the creativity of some mad genius developer who comes up with some completely new concept. The point is that his new concept has to be integrated first to become useful. In engineering, we’ll keep on inventing new solution principles. I don’t think this will ever come to an end, but to integrate these and develop them into a product will become more challenging.”

And you presume that this is more challenging for the Dutch than for the Germans?

“Now, when I speak of the ‘Dutch way of working,’ I’m not referring to the Dutch as a people. I’m talking about a way of working characterized by a low level of displayed hierarchy, an accepted high degree of individualism and an optimistic and pragmatic attitude toward risk-taking on the way to new horizons that I’ve observed here in the Netherlands. It’s the same bold attitude that led the ancestors of today’s development engineers centuries ago to climb aboard small wooden sailboats – crazy, I say – and set out for the East Indies. That in itself is a very positive attitude. But in the age of integration, it must be accompanied by serious efforts at quality, structure and speed in system integration to turn an invention into a perfectly functioning, marketable product. And my observation is that the art of integration is a topic where we can learn from others, namely from the Asian environment. Our task in development in Central Europe will be not to lose the advantages of the ‘Dutch way of working’ and remain professional and fast in system integration. This will demand new qualities in project leadership to keep all that jazz in a healthy relationship with each other. That’s to say, Germans or whoever can also work ‘the Dutch way’ and will have to face the same challenges. I’m an example of this.”

Is inventing more like combining known technologies and is systems engineering getting more complex?

“I don’t like the word ‘complex’ because it’s a relatively unsharp term, often used in the context ‘being difficult and not clear.’ I observe that nowadays, we’re integrating subsystems to fulfill very specific purposes. That’s leading to a completely new way of managing product lifecycles and system integration requirements. I don’t see this race for complexity continuing endlessly. We’ll be building more for purpose.”

“For example: 25 years ago, automotive suppliers were building ten different water pumps for car manufacturers to choose from. They were attached to the motor using an external bracket and they were ready to go. Nowadays, each variant of a car type has a sophisticated supply chain for its own optimized water pump. If you’re buying a Volkswagen Golf with a combustion engine, there’s a pump for each variant of that engine. Bottom line: the component itself may get less complex. It can be simpler because it has to fulfill fewer purposes than each of the former ten variants of water pumps, which had to do basically everything.”

What’s driving this?

“The driving force behind this kind of segregation of variants is the fact that we’re using only the fully integrated products. Customers want a perfect car, not a perfect water pump. They don’t pay for that. That basically means the water pump needs to be just good enough for the user profile of the car buyer.”

When it comes to system design, there’s a big difference between building specialty machines and high-end consumer products like cars, says Claussen. In the consumer market, you can design the component lifetime. “The rear lights of modern cars are designed to work during the whole lifetime of the super system. You can’t exchange individual LEDs anymore, only the complete module. So, you must understand in detail the aging behavior and the major reasons why your devices fail – as part of your design and development process.”

In specialty machine building, Claussen says he has so far not seen anyone designing for reliability. “Designing for a certain lifespan of the complete system, I mean. When you buy plasma deposition equipment, an extruder or a wafer scanner, they’re built to be repairable and upgradable. As such, the chosen system architecture makes it possible to extend their life almost indefinitely. This is a system choice you must make deliberately and really early in the project.”

“A good project leader repeatedly asks the developers: what are the consequences for the customer who uses your product?” Photo bij Fotogen Fotostudio.

You and your development team need to understand from the very beginning what your product is going to be in the end?

“That’s why it doesn’t help if you just say systems engineering is getting more complex. You must consciously make fundamental choices on scales like ‘indefinite lifetime’ concepts versus ‘the first fail that kills the system’ concepts. And this happens very early in the project, when there’s still a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity.”

“Here, a good project leader comes into play. He needs to get the required expertise together on one table and has to drive his people into a corner where most developers are feeling uncomfortable, by asking them repeatedly: what are the consequences of your decision for the customer who’s going to use your product? Will it help him solve his problem? Is he going to be happy with it or not? Do the customer’s wishes match the product that you envision yourself?”

Why do developers feel so uncomfortable with that?

“When you look at conventional education, most of the engineers are taught to look downwards into their system. They’re experts in delivering detailed solutions to problems someone else gave them. Now, in the age of integration, we must turn this around to be effective and efficient with our solutions. When we turn it around and ask engineers whether they’re about to solve the right problem for the customer’s value, most will feel uncomfortable in the beginning. The good news is: I’ve never experienced that a smart engineering team isn’t capable of answering these kinds of questions once they embrace the importance of it and recognize the way to get there.”

So, a project leader has to recognize the kind of project he’s dealing with and set priorities accordingly?

“This is exactly what I expect from a good project leader. That he can slice down the problem. In doing so, he consciously identifies what is the right approach for which part of his project. If he can’t, it’s going to be a failure. If he can, it’s going to be a thrill ride.”

To explain what this means for project leaders, Claussen draws a comparison with dropping paratroopers. “When they land in a field after jumping from an airplane, they don’t start running in all directions. The first thing they’re supposed to do is look around, gather intel and understand where they are. That’s exactly what a good project leader does. The first thing is to make sure the people in his group understand where they are and where they need to go. That’s step one, always. If you obey that, I think it’s completely irrelevant whether you’re developing a water pump or an X-ray scanner. Because you bring into your team the persons with experience for making a pump or an X-ray machine. A project leader doesn’t need to have all the experience for that. I would even say it’s more important to have a well-developed awareness of your and your team’s limitations and blind spots. And of course, a methodology needs to be established to digest all relevant system architecture aspects before you start running. Then you may make very conscious choices for all different aspects within your system architecture, including reliability, performance, redundancy, repairability and so on. All these decisions have to be made at the beginning of your development. Providing structure paves the road to success. And if the development succeeds, it’s highly satisfying.”

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

Taking a swing at his 3rd career opportunity, High Tech Institute trainer Kees Rijssenbeek has found his cup of tea and his calling. Now, he’s putting his energy into helping technical minds navigate challenging social interaction and giving them the tools, and knobs, to help them fine-tune their approach.

After a few years of trying his hand at mergers, acquisitions and employment law with the Dutch office of the US-based multinational law firm Baker McKenzie, Kees Rijssenbeek realized that corporate law just wasn’t his thing. “In hindsight, I guess you could say the company was much clearer on it not being my cup of tea – more so even than me,” recalls Rijssenbeek jokingly. “In law, you either move up the ladder or you’re out. And while I was just starting to entertain the idea of becoming a partner, it turns out the firm didn’t share the same vision, so out I was, along with about two-thirds of my colleagues.” Rijssenbeek continues, “It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Looking back, the 80-hour work weeks with troves of legal paperwork was never going to make me happy.”

Kees Rijssenbeek: “I came to the realization that the most exciting and interesting part of any of my jobs was the personal human interaction.”

For his next move, Rijssenbeek had a go at the retail domain, where he contributed to the marketing and commercial team of the cosmetics brand Rituals. This was during the brand’s early days, when it was just working to make a name for itself and had only one office in Amsterdam with about ten employees. “While it was a big change from corporate law, I found I was having the same kind of feeling. For the most part, it was just a job and didn’t really give me any energy,” remembers Rijssenbeek. It was then that he began thinking about what would motivate his interest. “I started to take some personal training courses in my free time to discover who I was and what I wanted. I came to the realization that the most exciting and interesting part of any of my jobs was the personal human interaction.”

“Looking back at this part of my life, I realize two things. First, I’ve always been interested in learning about people and I’m good at listening and truly hearing what they have to say. Of course, it was coming to the business of training that helped me come to that realization,” suggests Rijssenbeek. “The second thing is, I really should have purchased shares in Rituals way back when it was so small. I guess we learn a lot of things in hindsight.”

 

Jealous

Now in the professional training domain for the last ten years, Rijssenbeek seems to have found his calling, or his cup of tea, as it were. Three years ago, he joined the High Tech Institute team where he delivers the training “Effective communication skills for engineers” aimed at helping technical people master some of the biggest communication challenges and pitfalls. But it’s working with this particular audience of highly technical people that leaves him a little envious.

“Not to generalize too much, but something I notice in many technical people is that they have a few traits that I’m pretty jealous of. One is that they’re pretty humble and have good insight into the limitations of what they know and what they don’t yet understand, be it in the laws of nature, the laws of physics or beyond. They’re also wired with a very real desire to solve problems,” illustrates Rijssenbeek. “There’s sort of an absence of the whole political way of dealing with each other. They’re interested in, does it work? If it does, great, we’ll use it. If it doesn’t, then it’s right back to the drawing board to find a solution. It’s not about getting all the credit. That’s certainly not the case in business law and marketing.”

 

Knobs

That said, there are also some common obstacles that prove to be a challenge for many technical people, especially in communicating. For instance, spending a lot of time in circular conversations and getting nowhere, having trouble getting buy-in from stakeholders or coming off as too critical when delivering feedback. While in the technical world most issues can be quantified and calculated, using data to make assumptions, when it comes to personal communications, it can be a little more challenging if you don’t know what cues to pick up on. And it’s to this end that Rijssenbeek looks to help guide training participants.

“From miscommunications to personal life issues to people just having a bad day, there are a number of factors that affect interpersonal communications. What this training is all about is to teach some of these basic knobs that can be fine-tuned to help people communicate more effectively,” highlights Rijssenbeek. “The first and probably most important knob is active listening. As simple as it may sound, active listening is often completely overlooked and underappreciated.”

According to Rijssenbeek, in the high-tech domain, when surrounded by highly intelligent experts, people often think they’re on the same page and have come to an agreement, only to find later that they interpreted the conversation completely different. “Too often, we fall in the trap of being stuck on send, rather than receive, or truly listening. Active listening takes practice and effort and requires someone to turn off their desire to jump in, to really hear and understand what someone is saying,” explains Rijssenbeek. “The easiest way to do this is to listen intently and then give a summary response to ensure understanding. It might sound easy, and it can be, but that’s one of the most effective parts of the training.”

Another knob used to help promote effective communications is the nonverbal cues, like body language and facial expressions that we use to communicate. “Nonverbal cues can be difficult for technical people to pick up on. With many of them tending to have their focus on content rather than interaction, they often have the expectation that others perceive things the same as they do. Reality, on the other hand, suggests something else,” says Rijssenbeek. “That’s why we spend the vast majority of the training practicing these and other skills. This isn’t a course based on theory and endless discussions, it’s about putting it to practice and trying to build new habits to better navigate communications in a technical workplace.”

This article is written by Collin Arrocho, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

As a project leader, you have to be clear about your personal boundaries, says Wilhelm Claussen. Bringing with him experience in the semicon, automotive and special equipment industries, he’s starting as a trainer in project leadership at High Tech Institute. In this interview, Claussen talks about what makes a project leader and the dos and don’ts.

“With the right attitude, the right focus, the right spin in the right team, you can do pretty much anything, regardless of the cultural backgrounds of the people in your team.” Wilhelm Claussen raises the subject when asked about what influences development projects. According to him, the most important component is leadership. The term keeps popping up in our conversation. Claussen himself has plenty of experience in this field, having led tech development projects throughout his whole career in automotive, semicon and special equipment.

To kick off with the basics, Claussen underlines that he likes to separate project management from project leadership. “Project management is administration. It builds an environment for the project execution. The leadership part is about the people. It gives them a focus, the right pace and the right goal. To phrase it differently: bad project management with good project leadership may still prevail and give good results. Good management with bad leadership will result in a well-documented disaster.”

In the same vein, Claussen argues that the success of a project isn’t dependent on the chosen methodology – Prince2, waterfall, Agile or whatever. “The essence of success in projects is leadership, recognizing and sensing ahead of time if something is missing or looking strange.”

Trainer Wilhelm Claussen. Photo by Fotogen Fotostudio.

Flawless execution

Claussen started his career in the mid-nineties in the Dresden wafer fab for DRAM memory chips of Siemens Semiconductors. “That might sound boring and traditional, but at that point in time, I experienced an environment with a real startup mentality. Siemens had almost missed the train in the microelectronics race and got a last chance to succeed.”

By the time the chip activities were spun out as Infineon in 1999, Claussen was ramping up wafer fabs around the world. “Basically, we transferred process technology from Dresden to fabs in the US, China and Taiwan.”

The big challenge was to flawlessly copy technology while it was still in development. “It was highly dynamic and had to be done with an extremely high pace. Especially in the DRAM business speed matters. Every month of delay translated directly into lower margins. The key task was to establish a robust but flexible project structure enabling the transfer of a manufacturing process of six hundred individual steps and make it work at a different site thousands of kilometers away. All the while, the process itself was still in development. That meant we had to be flexible for adaptations that were coming out of Dresden with respect to recipes, tools, sequence changes and all these things while being crisp and clear on the verification of the results on our product.”

Asked about the importance of a flawless project execution here, Claussen answers: “It’s really pretty simple. If you do anything wrong, the chip is dead. If you miss even a detail in one of your six hundred process steps, the result is very expensive scrap. We were transferring the processes to running foreign factories. There, we had to deal with different rule sets, different toolsets, different languages and, last but not least, different mindsets of the engineers.”

Later in his career, Claussen worked in the automotive industry and for special equipment companies like ASML and Roth & Rau (now Meyer Burger).

Outside view

Talking about the dos and don’ts in project leadership, Claussen dishes up four focal points. The first: never lose the main line. “In two minutes, you have to be able to explain the main steps and how you want to achieve the goals. The moment you realize you can’t, you need to rethink your strategy. Funny enough, I also do that in daily life sometimes. Just to check whether I can still cover it all. Once I recognize that I’m no longer able to summarize my project in two minutes, my alarm bells go off and I basically start to rethink my project. Otherwise, complexity will kill you. You’ll start to make mistakes, overlook things and at the end of the day, you’re exhausted and your products are dead.”

The second pitfall is ticking off boxes blindly. “Check, double-check and check again. Make sure you’re aware of the real project progress.” Claussen explains that this is all about creating an unbiased and independent outside view of the project. “Because you have to recognize that the moment you’re following a certain sequence or a manner of asking about the project progress, the system will start to bend to satisfy your request.”

Claussen developed his own methods to avoid this. “I frequently force myself to change the way I look at the progress of the project. And in doing so, I’m able to challenge the way the team reports progress. I do this to understand whether the people are actually delivering in time and if the reports are reasonably correct.”

“People in an automotive company could be rewarded for mounting wheels on cars because, in this company, this should be the last thing you do in manufacturing,” Claussen illustrates. “If your metric of project success is based on mounting four wheels on every car, you create an intrinsic opportunity for people to adapt to the metric rather than to the real progress by mounting wheels to even unfinished cars. This is normal human behavior and as a project leader, you constantly need to prevent these kinds of distortions. If you publish a reporting request, people will naturally try to look good in this reporting. And they’ll always report in the way that was successful last time. So you have to avoid that because you want to make sure that no one is ticking off boxes blindly and that people are reporting the real progress that they’ve made.”

Claussen’s third point is also a don’t: never delay required decisions, as hard and as painful as they might be to take and to communicate. “Naturally, you can expect headwinds and hiccups there. This is what real leadership is about. You should do this early and intelligently. Because this is a delicate subject, which can also seriously limit your career if you do this wrong. Nevertheless, it’s extremely important to act early after you’ve become aware. With an early decision and an early maneuver, you can maintain the legroom to counteract.”

His fourth and last advice: never take no news for good news. “The fact that you don’t hear anything from a certain project part doesn’t mean that they’re making progress. De-commitment is always silent. Later, it will come to haunt you for sure. It’s actually a little brother of the third rule because the persons not communicating their problem are basically avoiding the decision to communicate. As a leader, you need to recognize this. You have to understand: wait a minute. These guys haven’t talked to me for the last two weeks. Why is that? There can be a very simple reason. The person making the report might have had a personal problem, but there might also be a big hiccup they’re reluctant to talk about.”

Did you ever arrive at the point where you couldn’t defend your project anymore?

“Sure. And at that point, you have only two options. First, reshape your project, approach your sponsors and stakeholders and make sure that you get a new commitment to what you’re trying to change. If that doesn’t work, the second option comes into play: you have to give back your assignment and leave. This is one of the few things Donald Trump was correct in: you always have to be prepared to walk away from the table. Otherwise, you’ll become a victim. Becoming a victim is one of the traps I’ve seen many project leaders fall into – including me.”

It’s rather big trap.

“Yes, and it can lead to a lot of frustration.”

Once again: you have to have the guts to walk away?

“Yes. You won’t do that easily, but it’s very important for your personal well-being. You have to know your limits and need to communicate that to your stakeholders: that’s the red line that they mustn’t cross.”

Claussen gives an example from the time he worked in a company that developed special machines for the solar industry. Located in Korea, he was running the projects for the Indian and Asian branches. “That in itself was already quite a lot of work. All of a sudden, I received a call to also rescue a project they had running in Spain. I told them: because you have no one else to fix it right now, I’ll do this for three months, but not longer. Apart from traveling to Shanghai, Incheon and Hyderabad, I started to routinely fly to Madrid. After six weeks, I noticed that my management hadn’t taken any steps to mitigate the situation. They simply hadn’t followed up on their part of the deal and so I reminded them: I’ll do this for another six weeks and if you don’t change the situation, I’ll leave. Guess what happened? In the remaining time, they still didn’t do anything. So I left.”

Were they surprised?

“They sure were. The message I want to convey is that you have to protect yourself, and you need to be clear about what your red lines are. You have to communicate these red lines to the stakeholders and participants in the project so that they can act on them. Of course, I felt a little bit like a traitor walking away from my onsite team, as we were a good crew. Nevertheless, it was the right decision.”

Are these situations not the very nature of being a project leader?

“These situations are common in many projects. And that’s exactly why it’s so important for project managers to master them constructively. To do that, you need a certain mindset and preparedness. As a project manager or project leader, you constantly feel pressured to be faster, use fewer resources, be cheaper, get to market sooner. However, if you’re clear about your limits and constraints, your chances increase of getting across to people on the other side of the table what commitment means to a project. Commitment basically means signaling your agreement to follow the path you’ve laid out to achieve the project’s goal – nothing more, nothing less. When people’s expectations of you as the project manager become too strange, too weird and too abrasive, you have to cross the line and say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”

“Being at this crossing point, it’s very helpful to realize, engagement is not a one-way subject. It’s kind of a two-way performance contract. Your sponsors can’t arbitrarily change the scope or any other agreed-upon part of the project and expect you to blindly follow. If the rules agreed upon by you and your stakeholders or project sponsors are violated, there must be consequences. If you don’t take immediate action on those violations, they’ll be committed again the next Monday.”

Claussen stresses that this has nothing to do with running away from or avoiding responsibility. “Nor is it about refusing to change. I’m talking about a serious violation of the agreed-upon set of rules by the people who gave you your marching orders without renegotiating or adjusting. And that’s where you have to be clear about where your boundaries are.”

Is staying true to yourself more important than your career?

“That’s a question that everyone has to answer for themselves. I think what’s important is that you know your own red lines and that others know that you take them seriously. No matter how powerful the stakeholders and project sponsors look, they need the project manager to get something done. So you need to be clear at the outset how much you’re committing and how much you’ll deliver, and you also need to hold the other ‘contractors’ accountable for delivering on their promises.”

This article is written by René Raaijmakers, tech editor of Bits&Chips.

Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) is a topic that few mechanical engineers get excited about. They point to the electronics engineers when the system fails the legal testing process. However, the theme has so many mechanical aspects that mechanical engineers cannot do without the EMC basics.

What do you do when you want to ensure that the electronics in a housing do not overheat? Right, you make a nice hole in the casing so that the heat can get out. Easy. From a purely mechanical perspective, there is little wrong with that approach. Electronical engineers will be less happy with the solution since there is a huge risk that such a hole transmits all the electromagnetic radiation and the device will no longer pass the compatibility tests that are required by law before an electronic product release.

Marcel van Doorn: “The challenge with EMC is that mechanical and electronical engineers often don’t speak each other’s language.”

Marcel van Doorn, teacher at High Tech Institute and retired at the beginning of this year after a long career at Philips, has often seen things go wrong. “Mechanical engineers never heard anything about electromagnetic compatibility during their education. Radiation from antennas is usually completely new knowledge for them. As a result, they do not realize who their design choices affect electromagnetic compatibility. Electronical engineers have that wisdom, but communication between the two disciplines regularly goes awry. Drawings are thrown over the fence without much explanation and then things are bound to be misunderstood. Regularly, you hear about electronic devices or installations that are disturbed by electromagnetic radiation from nearby mobile phones. Think of robot arms or scooters that tilt, screens that become unreadable, or communication connections that are broken.”

Although EMC is the domain of the electronical engineer, Van Doorn emphasizes that it is also the responsibility of their mechanical counterparts, precisely because many things have to be solved in mechanics. “The challenge is that they often don’t speak each other’s language.” Therefore, Van Doorn has trimmed down the extensive EMC course for electronical engineers to a one-day, hands-on refresher course, which can be followed at the High Tech Institute, especially for mechanical engineers.

 

In harmony

Back to basics, what is electromagnetic compatibility? “It’s a positive word,” says Van Doorn. “After all, it means that devices are compatible with each other, that they continue to function properly in close proximity. That is the goal you pursue. If they are in harmony with each other, one device will not disturb the other. Mobile communications and security services should not be affected by it either, and vice versa.”

“When you used to go to a hospital, you were often asked to switch off your phone,” he continues. “To take no chances, cell phones had to be turned off so that heart monitoring systems, among other things, continued to run normally. Virtually no one did – and does – so now the EMC requirements in the medical world have become much stricter.”

 

No slit, but holes

What exactly is wrong with the aforementioned hole in the electronic housing? “Because of EMC considerations, electronics are often put in a casing,” answers Van Doorn. “This way, you create a Faraday cage from which no electromagnetic field can escape. If you make holes in the housing for cooling or to allow cables to run through, you breach that shielding.” Whether that also poses a problem, depends on the frequencies in the system. “If such a slit is resonant for the wavelength, the radiation simply flies out. It may be difficult to imagine, but then you have created an effective antenna.”

The solution is relatively simple: do not make a slit, but instead go for a series of small holes that together have the same surface area. As a result, the heat can escape to a sufficient extent, but the electromagnetic radiation cannot.

“Once you know it, it’s simple.”

Now that the frequencies in electronics are increasing, from MHz to GHz and higher, the wavelengths are getting smaller and the design correspondingly more challenging. “A frequency of 1 GHz means a wavelength of about thirty centimeters”, Van Doorn calculates. “The rule of thumb is that if you want to reduce the radiation emission level by a factor of ten, the hole in the casing should be no more than one twentieth of the wavelength. In this case, one and a half centimeters. At 10 GHz you already go to 1.5 mm.”

You can apply the same simple calculation to other situations. “An electronic engineer often tells his mechanical colleague that the printed circuit board must be grounded,” says Van Doorn. “In the design, he must then include a connection to the chassis. At frequencies of 1 GHz, that wire again not be longer than one and a half centimeters. So the old-fashioned, robust design has to become more and more refined.”

“In addition, the ground wire and other cabling cannot be everywhere,” warns Van Doorn. “The fields emitted by the electronics board can couple precisely with those cables, which often results in a much more efficient antenna than the traces on the PCB. So position the cable alongside the printed circuit board, and certainly not above it. Once you know it, it’s simple.”

 

Dropping pennies

Electronics should tell their mechanics colleagues about things like this, but in practice many development companies lack that communication. The result is that a device does not pass the EMC tests and an expensive redesign is required. The aim of the High Tech Institute training ‘EMC for mechatronic engineers’ is therefore to make mechanics aware of the issues, to teach them the EMC language and to give them a number of simple tools with which to solve EMC problems.

In his training courses, Van Doorn follows the principle of Confucius: “Hear it and you forget it, see it and you remember it, do it and you understand it.” Van Doorn: “Of course I can give an extensive theoretical discourse on all aspects of EMC, but that goes in one ear and out the other. As a teacher, it is important that you make the link between simple theory and practice. During my career I have collected many demos in which all the principles are explained in a simple way. With a spectrum analyzer you can then see, for example, that a large slit emits much more than a pattern of small holes. Because of that very important, practical side, I did not think it was wise to give this course online in corona time. You have to be able to feel it, to get hands-on with the theory.”

Van Doorn encourages students to bring their own product. “During the lessons, we discuss these and in almost all cases there are a lot of points for improvement.” It is really nice if the course is given as in-house training, Van Doorn has experienced. “Then the mechanical and electronical engineers gather around their device and there is plenty of discussion. Suddenly you hear the pennies dropping everywhere.”

Van Doorn notes that there is more and more deliberations between different disciplines. “Through trial and error, companies have become wiser. I do see an improvement there, but things still go wrong very regularly, even between the different sub-disciplines in an electronics department. The major benefit of the course must be that mechanics are aware of the challenges in EMC, that they ask the right questions of their electronics colleagues, and that they close the door before the horse has bolted.”

Mechanics really don’t need to become EMC experts for this, Van Doorn emphasizes. “With a refresher course of one day you can overcome a lot of problems. It doesn’t take much time and it certainly will pay off. So, managers of mechanics departments, send your people and avoid expensive redesigns.”

This article is written by Alexander Pil, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

Recommendation by former participants

By the end of the training participants are asked to fill out an evaluation form. To the question: 'Would you recommend this training to others?' they responded with a 8.3 out of 10.

High-precision mechatronics is one of the strengths of the region. To maximize the system performance, it is crucial to have a good metrology and calibration strategy. “Think ahead,” advises Rens Henselmans, teacher at High Tech Institute. “And beware what is really needed.”

 

Suppose you want to build a machine that can drill a hole in a piece of metal. The holes have to be drilled with such a level of accuracy that, once drilled, two separate pieces will fit perfectly together and can be connected with a dowel. What would that machine look like? And how will you reach the required precision? When you drill both holes slightly skewed in the same way, the pin will probably still fit. But if the deviation is not the same from one piece to another, you are screwed. And what if you place two drilling machines next to each other and combine their outputs; what will be the requirements then? Or more extreme, what if you buy the first part in China and the second in the US, what measures are necessary to ensure the dowel fits?

Even in an example as simple as drilling a hole, it turns out that it isn’t at all trivial to reach a superhigh level of accuracy. Parameters such as measurement uncertainty, reproducibility and traceability must be well defined. If you haven’t mastered that as a system designer, you can forget about accuracy.

The term accuracy is often misused, says Rens Henselmans, CTO of Dutch United Instruments and teacher at High Tech Institute. “It is a qualitative concept: something is accurate or not. But there is no number attached to it,” he explains. That in itself is not a bad thing, he has experienced, “as long as everyone knows what is meant. Usually, it concerns the measurement uncertainty. That is, a certain value plus or minus one standard deviation.”

Check out his training

Rens Henselmans: ‘You can’t add calibration in your system afterwards.’

 

The meter

Reproducibility is often mixed-up with repeatability. The latter term describes the variation that occurs when you repeat processes under exactly the same conditions. “Same weather, same time of day, same history,” says Henselmans, summing up the list of boundary conditions. “Reproducibility is the same variation, but under variable conditions, such as a different operator or even a different location. It is the harder version of repeatability since more factors are in play.” However, that system requirement is essential. “Without reproducible behavior, you have nothing,” declares Henselmans. “If your machine doesn’t always do the same thing, you can’t correct or calibrate system errors. Reproducibility is the lowest limit of what your machine will ever be able to do, if you could calibrate the systematic errors perfectly.”

Then traceability. “Internationally, we have made agreements about the exact length of a meter,” says Henselmans. “At the Dutch measurement institute NMI, they have a derivative of this, and every calibration company has a derivative of that. The deeper you get into the chain, the greater the deviation from the true standard and therefore the greater the uncertainty. When you present a measurement with an uncertainty, you should actually indicate how the uncertainties of all parts in the chain can be traced back to that one primary standard. Very simple, but it is often forgotten when talking about accuracy.”

Fortunately, that is not always necessary. “When you describe a wafer, it doesn’t matter at all whether or not the diameter of that wafer is exactly 300 mm,” says Henselmans. “The challenge is to get the patterns neatly aligned. And even if the pattern is slightly distorted, it’s not disastrous, as long as that distortion is the same in every layer. It only gets tricky when you want to do the next exposure on a different machine, or even on a system from another manufacturer. Then they must at least all have the same deviation. Gradually, you come to the point that you want to track everything back to the same reference and thus ultimately to the meter of the NMI.”

 

Common sense

What is really needed, depends strongly on the application and on the budget you are given as a designer. “Technicians are prone to want too much and to show that they can meet challenging requirements. But that often makes their design too expensive,” warns Henselmans. His company, Dutch United Instruments, is developing a machine to measure the shape of aspherical and free-form optics, based on his PhD research from 2009. “At the start of that project, we wanted to achieve a measurement uncertainty of 30 nanometers in three directions. At some point, the penny dropped. Optical surfaces are always smooth and undulating. If you measure perpendicular to the surface with an optical sensor, an inaccuracy in that direction is a one-to-one measurement error. That’s where nanometer precision is really needed. But parallel to the surface, you don’t measure dramatical differences. Laterally, micrometers suffice. That insight suddenly made the problem two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional.”

During the training, Henselmans regularly uses the optics measuring machine from his own company, Dutch United Instruments, as an example.

So always use common sense when thinking about accuracy. “It is okay to deviate from the rules, as long as you know what you are doing,” says Henselmans. The required knowledge comes with experience. “You learn a lot from good and bad examples.” That is why Henselmans uses many practical examples during the training ‘Metrology and calibration of mechatronic systems’ at High Tech Institute, including his own optics measuring machine and a pick-and-place machine. “We do a lot of exercises and calculations with hidden pitfalls so participants can learn from their own mistakes.”

Check out the training

 

Abbe

As for the metrology in your machine, you have to think carefully about where to place the sensors. “Think of a caliper,” says Henselmans. “The scaling there is not aligned with the actual measurement. So, if you press hard on those beaks, they tilt them a bit and you get a different result. This effect occurs in almost all systems, even in the most advanced coordinate measuring equipment. Between the probe and the ruler in those machines you’ll find all kinds of components and axes that can influence the measurement.”

Bringing awareness to these effects is what Henselmans calls one of the most important lessons of the training. “It comprises the complete measurement loop with all elements that contribute to the total error budget,” he explains. Generally speaking, you want to keep that loop small and bring the sensor as close to the actual measurement as possible. “Unfortunately, there is often a machine part or a product in the way which makes it difficult to comply with that Abbe principle. Also, you should realize that you are not alone in the world. The metrologist might indeed prefer short distances to achieve the highest accuracy according to the Abbe principle. The dynamics engineer, however, would prefer to measure in line with the center of gravity, otherwise all kinds of swings will disrupt his control loops. The metrologist will argue that these oscillations are interesting precisely because they influence system behavior. Together, they have to find the right balance.”

Making that decision is one of the discussion points in the course. One important aspect of this discussion is the need to have sufficient knowledge of the various sensors, and their advantages and disadvantages. During the training, interferometers, encoders and vision technology, among others, are therefore explained by specialists.

 

Reversed spirit level

Once you’ve got the metrology and reproducibility in your system in order, it’s time for calibration. “To correct for systematic errors,” Henselmans clarifies. The second half of the training is about how to do that. “The lesson to be learned is that you can’t add calibration in your system afterwards. You have to consider in advance how you are going to carry out the calibration and where you need which sensors and reference objects. If you wait until the end of your design process, you surely won’t be able to fit them in anymore.”

Before you have painted yourself into the corner, you must have a list of error sources, which ones you need to calibrate and especially how you are going to do that. Henselmans: “During my time at TNO, we once made a proposal for an instrument to measure satellites. A system about a cubic meter in size. We could test that in our own vacuum chamber. We had already set up all kinds of test scenarios when one of the optical engineers pointed out that you had to do a certain measurement at a distance of about seven meters, since that was where the focal point lay. So we had to carry out the calibration in a special chamber at a specialized company in Germany, which costed thousands of euros per day. It’s nice that we found this out before we sent our offer to the client.”

There are certainly calibration tools and reference objects available on the market, but in Henselmans experience you get stuck pretty quickly. “Certainly for larger objects, the list of options dries up quickly,” he says. Designers then have to fall back on ingenious tricks like reversal. “A wonderfully beautiful and simple concept,” says Henselmans and he explains: “Think of a spirit level. You can hold it against a door frame to determine how skewed it is. Then turn the spirit level over and see if the bubble is now exactly on the other side of the center. If not, the vial is apparently not properly aligned within the spirit level. You then have two measurements, so two equations with two unknowns which means you can calibrate the offset of the spirit level and the door at the same time. You can use that trick in more complicated situations, with more degrees of freedom and nanometer accuracy. That means you can get much further than with tools available commercially.”

Even better is to incorporate this technique in your design so that the machine can calibrate itself. “Make it part of the process of your machine,” advises Henselmans. “Then the stability requirement of the system drops drastically, and the system design becomes much simpler.”

 

This article is written by Alexander Pil, tech editor of High-Tech Systems.

Recommendation by former participants

By the end of the training participants are asked to fill out an evaluation form. To the question: 'Would you recommend this training to others?' they responded with a 8.5 out of 10.

For 40+ years, Frans Pansier has worked designing, developing, teaching and training advanced power supplies. According to him, challenging the mindset of young engineers is how he draws his energy. His favorite part? Sharing his knowledge and information that people simply can’t get at university – or anywhere else.

Power supplies are probably not something you spend a lot of time thinking about when you purchase a new laptop or TV. Most people just plug them into the power source and never think about them again. In reality, though, power supplies are a crucial part of fueling just about every piece of electronic equipment you own. They do this by taking the full power of the alternating current (AC) input from the grid, known as mains, and converting it into the usable voltage that gives life to electronics.

“Essentially every piece of electronic equipment, with the exception of a very few, needs an AC adaptor, externally or internally, to make use of the energy from the mains,” explains Frans Pansier, former Philips and NXP power supply specialist and High Tech Institute instructor with more than decades of experience in the domain. “Otherwise, the full flow of the 230 volts from the mains would fry the electronics and cause a lot of safety issues.”

Credit: Joyce Caboor

Development of modern power supplies really took off during the 1980s. Led by television technology companies, it was brands like Panasonic, Sony, Siemens and Philips, among a few others, that really made power supplies producible for industrial use. “Back then, every part, piece and component had to be developed in-house, because there were no manufacturers of suitable transformers, capacitors, and so on. There was really no market for that sort of thing at the time, so we had to do it all ourselves,” explains Pansier, who joined the Philips television division in 1986 to spend twenty years developing receivers, power supplies and other power electronics.

Outrageous

Conventional wisdom, perhaps guided by Moore’s Law, would suggest that as electronics continue to advance, newly developed technologies will become more efficient and less costly. However, when it comes to powering these modern technological marvels, wisdom is anything but conventional. In fact, according to Pansier, the information lining the textbooks at technical universities has hardly any relation with reality, and much of what the industry is using today stems from developments out of the Philips consumer electronics division – some forty years ago.

With a master’s degree in electrotechnical materials from Delft University of Technology, Pansier was familiar with a full spectrum of electronics components, ranging from semiconductors to magnetics, capacitors and more. But it wasn’t until he got several years of professional experience at Philips that it all came together. “With power supplies, you get the best performance for the lowest price when you know exactly what you can do with each of the components, and just as importantly, the things you better not do,” jokes Pansier. “But let me tell you, there aren’t a whole lot of people in the world that simply have this kind of knowledge.”

In fact, when Pansier looks back at his time at Philips, it becomes even more clear just how strong their development work really was. “In hindsight, I see just how outrageous and cutting edge our work was,” suggests Pansier. “Most evident is that, both then and now, consumer electronics companies are lightyears ahead of the TUs when it comes to this technology. It’s not a criticism of the TUs, it’s just that development in the area of power supplies can only come with years and years of experience, not a four-year PhD project. Even today, you’ll find that much of the material being taught at the TUs is the same as what I was learning and working with since 1980.”

Credit: Joyce Caboor

One of a kind

After years of working on development of power supplies, including the tedious work of patent applications for new designs and technology, Pansier was asked to set up a course, together with other specialists. Realizing how uncommon his experience was, from both the electronic components and industry standpoints, he wanted to help spread his knowledge and really challenge the mindset of younger and less experienced engineers. So, he became a trainer in Philips CTT, teaching about the ins and outs of power electronics, which at the time also focused on the picture tube and how to generate high voltage and deflection.

Pansier: “That course was completely designed by us, and I wrote five or six different parts for the training. It was so unique because, during my work, I visited various factories manufacturing the components and spoke to the design engineers to get the complete story, from characteristics to the physical parts. This information got woven into the one-of-a-kind course.”

By the end of the 90s, though, Philips had abandoned its TV development and the CTT course as well. But compelled to continue sharing information, Pansier took the decades-worth of accumulated knowledge and continued spreading it at NXP, where he worked as a power supply architect. Simultaneously, he worked with TU Delft to help guide students just getting into power electronics, and ultimately back at ‘home,’ as an instructor for High Tech Institute – the legacy of Philips CTT.

In the six-day “Swith-mode power supplies” training, Pansier walks participants through his long tenure in power electronics and helps increase their knowledge and comforts, as well as aids them in avoiding a number of the pitfalls that many engineers encounter. “We’ve put a lot of effort into cultivating a training that’s informative and thoroughly comprehensive,” describes Pansier.

“From the boundary conditions of both continuous and non-continuous modes in power electronics to the basic topologies of power supplies to the design, simulation and calculation methods needed to evaluate them, and reaching compliance standards for safety, reliability, EMI and efficiency – we really cover it all. That’s what makes this course stand, as it offers a unique view of the whole process and system, a view that has been built over several decades. And the biggest draw for people to come is easy. You simply can’t find this accumulation of information and experience anywhere else.”

This article is written by Collin Arocho, tech editor of Bits&Chips.