Just innovative IC design? It ’s professional passion and more

When speaking with Alan Chang, chief IC design engineer at Philips Electronics Asia Product Innovation Centre (APIC) in Singapore, you become aware of his quiet enthusiasm for what he does. Chang has been instrumental in Philips' market leadership of USB IC products, especially in the "on-the-go" (OTG) initiative which allows resource-constrained devices like mobile phones and PDAs to exchange data directly over USB without the need of a PC.

Chang, 41, stumbled into the IC design field almost by accident. After graduating with an MSEE from Iowa State University in 1991, his first job was at Lucent Technologies in Singapore. He worked in the company for four years before joining the then newly-established IC design team at Philips Electronics. The company sent him for training in Albuquerque, New Mexico, initially assigning him to design low-power BiCMOS standard logic ICs. It was there that he pioneered one of the industry's earliest IEEE 1394 chips. In 1997, Chang returned to Singapore to design USB IC products. He laughs when he recalls how an early competitor spelled out in detail to a high-profile potential customer the perceived shortcomings of the early Philips USB host controller products.

Instead of crying foul, Chang saw this as a useful product evaluation and responded by improving his designs. Consequently, his OTG chip design, a world's first that hit the market just three months after the OTG specification was released in 2001, was used by the USB Implementers Forum as the reference for OTG compatibility testing.

Subsequent design wins in high profile products like the Sony Clie were further endorsements of his skill. Chang attributes his achievements to lots of homework. Be properly acquainted with the wider system requirements, he advises, before working on the architecture. For the OTG chip design, it included intimately understanding how various operating systems transfer data, perform reads or writes, and handle interrupts so as to be able to design a chip that loaded the system CPU as little as possible. This was very much the result of cross- disciplinary collaboration within his team. Based on this work, Chang filed several patents covering efficient methods of transferring various types of data between USB chip and system CPU.

Semiconductor design excites Chang because, according to him, "after you plan and design, you can see with your own eyes something that works in a very tangible way." He enjoys the latitude given by his company, and his seniority places him in charge of a cross-functional team of IC designers and engineers. He relishes this because he gets to participate in the whole process, from product specification, coding OS drivers, and FPGA validation, to designing the IC into his customers' products.

Although Philips values his "highly-charged and entrepreneurial" character, Chang stresses the need for balancing work with private life. He negotiates hard for a design schedule that doesn't require his team to work many late nights or on weekends. He believes that this can be detrimental to an engineer's performance in the long run. However, he does not rest quietly from work. He runs the marathon in Singapore every year and, in the last run, was placed seventh in the "local veterans" category. Is this a testament to his calendar age? Perhaps. But as is typical of his attitude, he trains to improve his running time each year. He also holds a leadership position in his church, caring for a small group of members, and is careful to plan time with his family to the extent of still "dating" his wife (without their three daughters) at least once a month.

Says Chang, "As a parent and an engineer, time for spouse and children are important. Work will always be there. I do not believe in spending so much time at work that I lose touch with my family." A sage reminder for those in a field notorious for stress and burnouts. After you plan and design you can see with your own eyes something that works in a very tangible way.

You can reach Alan Chang at Philips, Singapore, (65) 6882-3000