Guests Ben Dannan | Uploaded : 12/12/2023
Military Prime Technical Fellow and Air Force Aviator, Ben Dannan, discusses his unique perspective on engineering. Both his time in the air and his time on the bench have worked together to make him a more effective systems engineer. (This is part 1 of a 3-part series)
2:30 Ben’s current role and work at NGC, and his career path that included his formal education, to engineering complex mil/aero systems and ultimately led him to join the Air Force active reserves while he continued to concurrently work as an EE.
6:15 Flight experience in peace and combat, what planes he was trained on and how that ultimately lead to his role as Air Commando that supports special operations teams.
9:42 How Ben became a Technical Fellow at NGC (he didn’t ask for it!) and how he thinks all of his outside projects helped to qualify him for this honor. In short, it takes a lot of hard work and Grit.
11:46 Background in his first DesignCon paper and the value of excellent mentors.
13:39 How and why Ben became a Keysight ADS Certified Expert. The importance of hard work and the value of having the ability to do end-to-end simulation.
15:30 How working on the ground as a civilian engineer in Iraq (with BAE) inspired him to join the Air Force Reserves in order to become an operator and gain tactical awareness that informed his engineering work. 20:50 Working with Lee Ritchey on an incredibly hard EMC problem. The problem of delineations of engineering disciplines and how the “gap” often causes unintended consequences.
24:36 The problem of ignoring board effects on your system, and why whole system simulation is critical
Links: Link to Ben’s publications page on his website
Signal Integrity Journal page for Ben’s publications:
Steve Sandler’s Presentation “The Unfortunate State of Power Integrity in Space Systems” Slide Deck and YouTube video presentation:
📘 Visit The EEcosystem Website For a Free Download to: Samtec’s white paper: Wideband
launches: Much more than Footprints on PCBs. and receive a free 90-day subscription to all of
Eric Bogatin’s training at The Signal Integrity Academy
👨🏽💻 For free Technical Resources and to Learn more about Keysight Pathwave EDA Software
Solutions visit the homepage now.
🔗 For all of your high-speed and RF connectors visit the Samtec website and access excellent
engineering resources while you are there.
⛰️ Visit Summit Interconnect for all your complex PCB manufacturing needs.
🔗 Visit Isola Group global for High performance laminates and prepreg materials for PCB
manufacturing, as well as new IC packaging interposer
💽 For high complexity EDA solutions visit SIEMENS EDA Website
💡 For a free subscription Signal Integrity Journal and articles about SI/PI/EMI, news and
technical resources follow the link above.
📨 Subscribe to Analog io a grass-roots weekly Newsletter written by hardware engineers, for
hardware engineers!
📡 For Custom RF and MW PCBs visit the Transline Technology Website to learn more. Visit
🔌 Picotest specializes in high fidelity testing and measurement tools, primarily for power-relate
applications. Visit their website for more product information and excellent training materials from
expert Steve Sandler