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Faculty profile: 'I want to prepare our students with the skills they need right from the start'

Eric Bogatin

Tell us a little bit about your professional background.

After receiving my PhD in physics, I worked in industry for 40 years at Bell Labs, Sun Microsystems and, most recently, Teledyne LeCroy. My wife and I started our own company, which we had for 20 years and that was acquired by Teledyne LeCroy. I am currently a fellow at Teledyne LeCroy and full-time faculty member at CU Boulder.

What courses do you teach in the high-speed digital engineering professional master’s program?

I have taught ECEN 5224 High Speed Digital design with Associate Professor Melinda Piket-May, ECEN 5730 PCB Design course and ECEN 5013 Advanced PCB design. I am currently developing a new course for the fall, ECEN 5534 High Speed Measurements for Signal Integrity.

What’s your favorite part about teaching these classes?

I have been involved in the signal integrity field for most of my professional career. Every time I teach a class or even just give a lecture on this topic, I feel like I learn something new — either a new design insight or even a better way of explaining a concept, based on the reactions and feedback from students. I love the idea that I am empowering the next generation of engineers with the best practices and skills they need to exceed in industry, not just as signal integrity engineers, but as hardware engineers in general.

What are some of the specific skills you teach that are important in industry?

There are four equally important skill sets we teach in the HSDE PMP program: the fundamental principles of how signals interact with interconnects, the best design practices to eliminate problems, the best analysis practices to validate or optimize a design in a virtual prototype, and the best measurement practices to validate the performance of a real prototype. In my new measurements class, ECEN 5534, offered in the fall for the first time, we focus on best measurement practices, such as high bandwidth scope measurements, TDR, VNA and even impedance analyzer measurements.

What impact do you hope your students have in this industry or in the world?

The company I started with my wife 30 years ago was focused on training professional engineers in the field of signal integrity. I developed a series of courses for engineers to get up to speed and become proficient designing high performance products incorporating best design practices. I want to prepare our students with the skills they need right from the start, so they are productive on design teams and do not have to take additional classes to be experts in designing with signal integrity in mind.