Keep your boss from worrying

If your current project exhausts all normal design time plus allowable extra time, here are some tips to overcome management worries.

• Oscillation
  High or low frequency, parasitic, load, layout, or heat related. Or, blame computer simulation that showed no stability problems.
• Feedback
  Everything was working until you closed the loop. A complex pole for compensation may be required.
• Noise
  Call attention to crosstalk that you could not have checked at the prototype stage. Note sagely that the problem is probably either intrinsic or extrinsic. Point out that adding optoisolators or shielding will take time.
• Jitter
  Blame jitter on components, terminations, transmission lines, speed, interfaces - or just cite jitter without offering explanation.
• Heat
  Blaming inadequate heat sinking or airflow is a good idea. "Typical drift" is a good excuse, too.
• Layout
  If you did not do the board layout, then place the blame on mistakes in the ground plane, ground loops, etc. If using a multilayer board, buy more time by maintaining that mistakes in a hidden layer make a completely new layout necessary.
• Delivery
  The samples and prototypes arrived late.

If these suggestions do not work, don't give up. Try glitches, overshoot or undershoot, static charges, threshold, hysteresis, and power supply problems (only if you did not design the power supply, of course). Then ask for the most expensive test instruments, computers, and software packages available. Failing all else, demand that management rewrite your project's specifications because the specs are obviously too tight. Finally, let the software department develop workarounds for your hardware problems.

zurück