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Issue 22
November 29, 2011
Allan Evans
Samplify Systems, Inc.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
4
Allan Evans
Vice President of Marketing, Samplify Systems, Inc.
Interview with Allan Evans
10
Ultrasound Beamforming
Development Kit
BY
ALLAN EVANS
A description of Samplify’s new Ultrasound Beamforming Development Kit.
11
Featured Products
13
Handling Clocks in Software
BY
DAVE LACEY
WITH XMOS
An introduction to the basics of software-based clocks.
17
Focus on Sensor Design
BY
STEVE KOLOKOWSKY
AND
TREVOR DAVIS
WITH CYRPESS
Discover the technology that makes today’s touchscreens work.
22
RTZ - Return to Zero Comic
3
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INTERVIEW
Allan Evans
Samplify Systems, Inc.
How did you get into
electronics/engineering and
when did you start?
My dad came home one day with
a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1
computer when I was in fifth grade.
It had four kilobytes of RAM. I tell
my kids that back in those days,
when we wanted to play a game
on the computer we had to actually
type it in ourselves and save it
on cassette. I was hooked on
the computer. I remember when
my dad went out and got a RAM
update from four to 16 kilobytes,
which at that time was more RAM
than anyone could possibly need.
It is neat how times have changed.
for our CPRI compression
technology, and I was amazed at
the capabilities.
I went to college at the University
of California, San Diego to study
electrical engineering and
earned my Master’s degree. After
working for a couple of years and
recovering from graduate school,
I decided to go back and get an
MBA. I did the night school thing
at Santa Clara University.
For software
I still use MATLAB a
bit.
What is on your bookshelf?
A friend recently gave me
Inbound
Marketing
by Hannigan and Shah,
and it really makes sense of how to
combine outbound marketing with
inbound marketing via Google
and social networks.
What are your favorite
hardware/software tools?
My hardware days are behind me,
but I recently had the opportunity
to use Agilent’s LTE test suite
Do you have any tricks up
your sleeve?
As you switch from engineering
to marketing you have to learn
that your job is now to define
problems, not to provide solutions.
Any company will have talented
engineers who can come up with
elegant technical solutions, but
often they fall into the trap of not
having defined the right problem.
Allan Evans - Vice President of Marketing, Samplify Systems, Inc.
Where did you go to work
out of school?
I went to work for a company called
Stanford Telecom, which, among
many other inventions, created
GPS technology. It was acquired
in the late 1990s by Newbridge
Networks, which has since been
4
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INTERVIEW
acquired by Alcatel.
IP eventually took over all of this.
This was really when I transitioned
into marketing for the first time.
When I joined Netro I was the
director of product marketing for
the broadband wireless product
the wireless operators are looking
for to make it truly a carrier class.
At that point we signed a system
integrator relationship with Lucent
and that really paved the way for
the IPO.
Right out of school I started as a
hardware and DSP engineer. For
eight years I worked at Stanford
Telecom on satellite transponders
for NASA. NASA would use them
for high-altitude weather balloon
experiments. This was interesting
because about two years ago, a
NASA employee stopped by our
booth and talked about how they
are still using these transponders.
Thinking back to how many green
wires there were going across
the boards, and the difficult life of
these transponders, I was amazed
to see that 18 years after I worked
on them, many of them are still
being used. When the balloons
come down they do not come
down very gracefully, and can end
up all over the place. I was just
amazed to hear that they are still
in operation.
After Netro, where did you
go?
I worked for Netro for five years,
and then worked on my own
start-ups. At the end of my tenure
at Netro, I was doing business
development, and that culminated
in the acquisition of the project
Angel Technology from AT&T
Wireless. That was a fixed and
mobile wireless technology, also
before WiMAX was WiMAX.
But at the time the market had
crashed, Netro’s stock was
trading below cash value. The
investors wondered why we
were making acquisitions in a
financial position where we could
not give any forward guidance.
So after that, Netro sold itself to
another company, SR Telecom.
They are still carrying on with the
technology.
...as you switch
from engineering
to marketing you
have to learn that
your job is now to
define problems, not
to provide solutions.
Any company
will have talented
engineers who can
come up with elegant
technical solutions,
but often times they
fall into the trap of
not having defined
the right problem.
The last project I worked on
at Stanford Telecom was a
broadband wireless system. This
was really in the days of WiMAX,
before WiMAX was WiMAX. That
was ultimately the product line
that Newbridge acquired from
the company. I went on to another
broadband wireless company
called Netro. In 1998 Netro had
a billion dollar IPO based on
quarterly revenues of $18 million.
It was perfect timing for me.
In 2003, it was a challenging
environment to try to launch a start-
up company, especially one that
relied heavily on semiconductor
business models. So after a couple
years of that, I went to work for a
company in the RFID field, Savi
Technology.
At Netro I was working on systems
providing broadband wireless and
T1 replacements for mostly small
and medium-sized enterprises
that only needed a couple of
megabits per second Internet
access. Technology allowed us to
do ATM over the years, but you do
not hear much about that anymore.
Savi specialized in active RFID,
so these were battery-powered
tags. The biggest market for this
particular RFID technology was
freight containers shipped through
the global supply chains. Other
applications are asset tracking
and drive applications. It is a
line. They just introduced a first-
generation system. Typical of
a startup, it kind of missed the
mark in terms of what the market
required. I came in and defined
a couple of critical features that
5
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