QA with Doug Ford, electronics designer Electronics News

Doug Ford is the owner and principal engineer of Doug Ford Analog Design, which he founded in 2008 as an electronic design consultancy.

 

How did you get started in electronics?

I started as a hobbyist. Back in those days, it was valves. Everyone was tossing out their old black and white valve TVs and buying colour TVs, so I'd grab them and strip the components out, and make guitar amplifiers and valve transmitters.

I then discovered transistors and the fact that you could do things with transistors rather similar to valves, and from a hobby, it grew into a profession.

I got an electrical engineering degree in university. My first major job was with Jands Electronics. I actually started with them prior to completing my degree, but as a bench technician.

Once I finished my degree, I was offered a role there as design engineer. I was with Jands for a total of around 19 years. That was back in the days when once you got a job, you figured that a job was pretty much there for life.

In the early days of Jands, they were manufacturing everything that you needed to put on a rock show. We are talking about power amplifiers, mixing consoles, lighting control consoles, lighting dimmers, high power PA speakers and signal processing gear.

Over a period of time, their product field narrowed until these days they are primarily manufacturing lighting control consoles. And I think they manufactured dimmers simply to support the consoles. Back in 1999-2000 I was getting pretty bored of designing dimmers all day.

So I went to RODE Microphones, where I was for about 18 months, and did some frankly, really good work there, designing very low noise microphone pre-amplifiers for their new range of mics. In fact to my best of my knowledge, to this day they are still using the topologies I developed during that time.

There was a conflict of personalities, so I went to Newcastle and worked for a family business called Woods Battery Chargers, designing industrial battery chargers.

Eighteen months, then back down to Sydney, to Thales Underwater Systems, designing sonar systems.for defense and seismic sonar systems for oil prospecting.

I was basically sold off, with part of that company to another French company called Sercel, who set up shop in the same building as Thales. Sercel took over the seismic sonar part of things, leaving Thales to concentrate on the military.

Sercel went belly-up in about '96-'97. That was when I went to Addcom, who were designing telephony headsets for call centres, and worked there for 20 months, before starting my own business.

How did you get into your current job?

It was about three and a half years ago that I figured it was time to strike out on my own. I set up Doug Ford Analogue Design. Initially, I got pretty good start-up money, because I was sub-contracting, doing a defence project.

That lasted for about 6 or 8 months. Then the company I was sub-contracting for went belly-up, owing me $27,000. But I survived that and survived the GFC.

What is your specialty?

I guess I am still across quite a diverse range of technology and industries, all of which require analogue expertise.

We're talking about anything related to power conversion, and also amplification, such as low-noise pre-amps for studio mics, it might be front-ends for sonar systems, a variety of different signal processing applications, and sometimes you mix the two together.

Sometimes you can combine all of those with a degree of thermal management expertise, and all of a sudden you realise you are in a good place to do some high brightness LED work.

What do you enjoy about your role?

I think that anybody who goes into business for themselves enjoys being their own boss, but that's actually a relatively trivial side of it.

What I most enjoy is firstly the range of different jobs, the different industries I can work with.

Secondly, there's always a real buzz that comes when you see something that you've worked on go into production and get used by people.

What challenges you?

I was bought up in a family that was not in business. A lot of families eat, drink and understand business right from the word go. They are picking up tax law with their mother's milk. Not so for me. I had to learn all the various business skills that were required in terms of administration, finance, all that sort of thing. I am still learning. That's a big challenge.

The second challenge relates to how do I go about marketing myself. How do I let my company name be known to people who need it. I am still frankly clueless in as far as that's concerned.

How has the industry changed?

In the 70s and 80s, you could expect an Australian manufacturer to pretty much have all of the technologies required to manufacture their product under one roof.

Things went pretty moribund in the 80s, and started reviving in the 90s, but now each company has its own particular skill set.

There's a lot more cross-fertilisation because the industries are somewhat more specialised now.

What problems face the electronics industry?

There is a hangover from the GFC, which might take a little while to fade.

Things change. Competitors pop up, new technologies can easily displace somebody's existing multi-hundred-million dollar industry with something that costs a tuppence that you can hold in your hand.

More and more often we are getting disruptive technologies. I think a degree of agility is required.

What advice do you have to give to younger engineers?

Don't leap from university into starting a business, unless you have a family background in business, and a whole lot of start-up money.

See if you can give yourself maybe somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen years of working for a few companies, so that you can learn the engineering methodologies from each one.

It behoves anybody to get a pretty wide cross-section - the more experience you can get, the better you'll be as an engineer. This applies whether you are talking about design engineers or QA type engineers.

QA with Doug Ford, electronics designer Electronics News