Montréal, Canada, December 22, 2014 — Introspect Technology, maker of innovative products that address the entire multi-Gbps test and measurement instrument experience, today announced that Philippe Lancheres, a Senior Member of Technical Staff, has been selected as Finalist for the prestigious DesignCon 2015 Engineer of the Year Award. Finalists are selected by a closed committee based on documented leadership, creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking applied to the development of next generation high-speed chips, boards, and systems. DesignCon community members are encouraged to vote for one of the selected finalists at the following web site:
EE Times Engineer of the Year Survey Link (voting open until January 4, 2015)
Less than a year ago, young Philippe Lancheres was assigned a seemingly insurmountable challenge. He had to spearhead the development of a complete test system for a new and yet-to-be defined high-speed technology geared towards next generation sensor devices, and he had to abide by stringent requirements of compactness, power efficiency, and world-class signal integrity. Now known as the MIPI C-PHY standard, this technology is based on innovative signaling and encoding technologies that depart radically from conventional SerDes architecture, and it thus required an entirely new breed of test and measurement equipment and – importantly – an entirely new approach to test instrument development. Armed with incredible clarity of thought, strong signal processing and signal integrity talent, and an unwavering will to complete his deliverables on time, Philippe rose to the challenge with apparent tremendous ease.
The unique test requirements for this development meant that Philippe and the hardware/software team working with him had to create the equivalent of multiple racks of tools in a product that is the size of a phablet. His first main challenge was to come up with Error Detector and BER technology for the unique non-deterministic encoding patterns of C-PHY. He created an ultra-compact look-ahead architecture that allowed him to not only perform BER on non-deterministic encoded data but to also gain insights into the encoding process itself, enabling error detection on signals before, during, and after encoding, an approach our company dubs multi-target BER testing. His architecture is currently the only Error Detector solution in the industry for C-PHY, and it is instrumental to the adoption of C-PHY into new mobile and sensor applications.
Apart from the analysis and generation portions of the design, Philippe refined various approaches to skew and jitter injection for C-PHY, creating what is believed to be the most compact massively parallel sub-picosecond timing generator in the industry. This allowed him to instrument tester-grade alignment and clock recovery processes using cost-efficient CMOS technology and in a manner that is completely transparent to the user. Most remarkable during the development of such major tasks was his ability to transition from white-board concepts to detailed simulations and hardware prototyping in a delightfully swift manner. His countless hours on the bench refining the methodology were paramount to product creation in very short time.
C-PHY is an emerging physical layer standard that allows for significant bandwidth improvements on constrained transmission channels such as those found inside mobile terminals. Introspect’s C-PHY test coverage is based on the highly integrated SV3C Personalized SerDes Tester, capable of testing up to 32 SerDes transmitters and receivers in an ultra-compact instrument form factor.
About Introspect Technology
Introspect Technology offers the most extensible measurement and optimization tools for high-speed digital product engineering teams worldwide. Our portable, software-defined instruments deliver unprecedented productivity enhancement throughout all stages of multi-GHz product development: from bring-up characterization, to system-level integration and optimization. Our mission is to enhance our customers’ competitiveness, product quality, and time-to-market.