Keep your boss from worrying

When your current project exhausts all normal design time plus allowable extra time, here are some tips to overcome managements worries. Blame problems on:
- 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 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 layer 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 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 spec are obviously too tight. Finally, let the software department develop workarounds for your hardware problems. EDN, 1991