I recently agreed to co-chair the IEEE MTT-S Women in Engineering (WIE) / Women in Microwaves (WIM) organization. I have long been an advocate for advancing the cause of women in the world of RF and microwave engineering, actually back to my college days at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) when I was one of only eight women in my EE graduating class of 110. Things have not improved much since then with women representing only 10 percent of IEEE WIE membership in the U.S. today.    Asia and Europe fare far better with approximately 40 percent and 20 percent respectively.

Why do we care about this? Women are a key demographic in any market and a valuable resource to our “dwindling pool of resources” within our chosen profession. We need more engineers of either gender and diversity in terms of more women in our field will certainly add a different perspective to ideas and insights, as it’s true that not all minds think alike.

One of the first things any of us can do to contribute to this is to promote awareness.  We need to find new and novels ways to encourage women to elect engineering as their career choice.  I spoke recently with former WIE Chair Karen Panetta, who helped me clarify that we need to tap into the “wonderment” of our career choice and make it desirable to the younger generations.   One way to do that is to highlight not only the successful women in our high-tech field like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer or Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, but also to talk about how our profession is what empowers the wireless revolution to take hold and thrive.  Watching my kids text, chat and clamor for free WiFi access brings home to me how all of this technology—from products to infrastructure—is largely thanks to microwave theory and techniques.

My co-chair and esteemed colleague Dr. Rashuanda Henderson and I are already formulating plans for improving awareness, communications, and a sense of camaraderie.   To that end, please make a point to support WIM by stopping by the reception at IMS 2013, Tuesday night from 6-9 p.m. at the Seattle Space Needle, Level 100!

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January started with a bang.  Three weeks of travel, which meant a lot of time sitting on planes and waiting for them.  The nice thing about this is that it gives me time to let my brain wander a bit and often times come upon new and interesting ideas that I can apply at AWR.  This blog isn’t about that per se, but rather the Shock and Ah! I experienced as I was catching up on my reading with a couple of interesting articles during my travel time. On my iPad Flipboard app, I stumbled across an article in IEEE Spectrum about the next generation of Lego MindStorms, MindStorm EV3, which was unveiled at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Lego Mindstorms is a collection combining Lego’s classic building blocks with programmable microcomputers that bring Lego creations to life. It talks about how this new toy, which has an EV3 intelligent brick, lets the builder program the robots without using a computer and that it is making robotics fun and fascinating for all ages.  What attracted me to it outside of my own love for Legos is that National Instruments, AWR’s parent company, is a key technology provider of this product—the intuitive software platform for EV3 is based on NI’s LabVIEW graphical programming software. LabVIEW is the same software that powers some of the greatest innovations in the world and is already plug-n-play within the AWR Design Environment™ to provide a seamless RF/microwave design and test flow. How’s that for a bit ofShock and Ah!…that’s cool.

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A few months ago, I heard a news program on NPR about the Khan Academy and how it was started accidentally by Mr. Khan to help his niece with her math homework. Since he lived far away from her, he captured his helpful hints via YouTube and shared via the Internet. One thing led to another and now Khan has found himself the creator of something big.

Since that NPR special, I’ve had a few chances to visit the website. There are over 3,200 videos on a wealth of subjects. I found myself touring around and clicking on things like art history, science, economics, history and even SAT prep, and getting progressively more excited by the proposition that this is a tipping point to excite kids to continue to be curious about math and science as they get older.

The Khan Academy concept reminded me of Professor Fornetti’s ExploreRF YouTube Channel, which offers training courses and webinars in RF and microwave related subjects, and of course AWR’s own AWR.TV portal. Our numerous video tutorials and vignettes are meant to accomplish the same for RF/Microwave education as Khan is for mathematics.  Both aim to excite current and future users to learn more about the wealth of capabilities in AWR’s software as well as the fundamental mathematic theories it solves.

AWR continues to be committed to helping university students learn more about RF/microwave design. To that end, we recently ran a contest to see if our strategies of supporting university engineering courses, awarding free software to engineering graduates, and sponsoring the IMS and EuMW Student Design Contests were having a positive impact. We were excited to find many success stories, two of which we have recently published. One design student at Istanbul University of Technology (read the story here>>) actually taught himself how to use Microwave Office through our documentation, extensive library of examples, and, most importantly, our AWR.TV videos. His journey resulted in a low noise amplifier design that won the Turkey Graduation Design Competition and was a finalist at the IMS Student Design Competition. Another student from Vienna University of Technology (read the story here>>) was able to design an X-band transmission analyzer from end to end thanks to several master’s degree courses that offered the use of Microwave Office, as well as attentive technical support. His design won the IMS Student Design Competition. Details on both of these stories can be found in the success stories included in this newsletter.

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I was pleased to be invited to participate on the Women in Electronic Design panel at DAC 2012 this past June. The theme: “The Mechanics of Creativity—What does it take to be an idea machine?” Design is an inherently creative process, but how can we be creative on demand? How can we rise above mundane tasks with flashes of brilliance, discover secrets of technical and business creativity and calculated risk taking, and share stories of innovation?

The organizers, moderators and panelists included Karen Bartleson, Director of Community Marketing at Synopsys, Holly Stump, High Tech Marketing, Lillian Kvitko, Director of Data and Resource Management, Microelectronics Group at Oracle, Dee McCrorey, Chief Risk Guru and Innovation Catalyst at Risktaking for Success LLC, and myself.

Creativity is not a topic electronic engineers talk about very often, so I worked through a number of questions beforehand to prepare…

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Earlier this year, I posted a blog, Are You a Do’er?, which was inspired from my participation at the Business of Software Conference late in 2011.  There was a wealth of content presented at that conference and of course it inspired another thought thread that now lends itself to a blog topic.

The theme… Road to Where?  Are you, or I, or perhaps both of us, on a road to nowhere? Are we caught up in the innovation race to add more features and functionality to our software/hardware/whatever product that we lose sight of what’s important to the user base?  This was the talk of a few folks at the conference, but one person in particular, Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, argued in his talk (here is the video) that we need to shift our focus away from adding more and more features into what is already a well-functioning product and keeping up the innovation race with our competition, and instead figure out how to bridge the divide between consumption and non-consumption. Prof. Christensen, who is also quoted in the book, Mastering the Complex Sale by Jeff Thule, asks what can you do to pull in new users/customers that for whatever reason have not found their way to your offering (product/service)?

Now I imagine I have a few of you interested in debating this with me and thinking, “Hold on a minute Sherry, are you saying to forget about your current customers and simply focus on the ‘haves’ vs. the ‘have nots’?”  Well, not at all! Prof. Christiansen goes on to explain that most customers today are bombarded with so much information about a product and service that we, by human nature, simplify it for sanity sake so that when it comes to a comparison of features/functionality, we are able – in a timely fashion – to reach a decision.

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