Tekmos' Blog

Last month, Tekmos both exhibited and presented a paper (HiTEN White Paper link)  at the 2015 HiTen conference in Cambridge, England.  Travel and especially international travel is a grueling experience.  So we try to have a fun activity scheduled in our plans.  And since the conference was only three days long, all of us took an extra two days of vacation to take advantage of the trip and see more sights.

When we arrived in Cambridge on Sunday, we walked over to the downtown area, and engaged in punting.  Punting is using a 10 foot pole to push a flat bottomed boat up and down the river Cam.  None of us had ever punted before, so we hired a professional punter to punt us up and down the river, and give a narrative of what we were seeing.  Most of the older colleges in Cambridge are located along the river, and it is a very nice and scenic trip.

Being engineers, we had to try our hands at punting.  We were successful, if you define success as not falling out of the boat.  Many of the other boaters were quite inebriated, and would occasionally fall out of their boats.

Later on, we all drifted back to London, and did some of the standard tourist activities, took a river cruise and went up the London Eye, visited the museums, and looked at the Rosetta stone.  And being engineers, we had to visit Greenwich and stand on the Prime Meridian.  After all, who but an engineer would travel 6000 miles to stand on a line that someone arbitrarily drew on the ground?

Bob Abrams and I spent a week in Japan last month.  The purpose of the trip was two-fold.  First, we had scheduled visits with current customer to review project status.  We also visited multiple prospective customers as part of our overall Japanese development strategy.  From a business point of view, the trip was quite successful.

We can summarize a business trip as being a plane trip, a hotel, a customer visit, back to the hotel, and then back to the plane.  And after a while, all business trips can seem the same.  I had decided a while ago to try to incorporate a little tourism into each trip, and this trip was no exception.  After all, Japan is an interesting country, and it would be a shame to see nothing more than the inside of a hotel.

On this trip, Bob and I were able to do two tourist things.

Being old, I like to see things that are older than I am.  So on a side trip to Nagoya, we visited the castle.  Originally built in 1612, it has been restored, and is an interesting look into Japan’s past.  While having a military aspect, is was more of a palace for the Tokugawa family.  The castle is topped off by two golden dolphins (Kinshachi), which is a tradition dating back to 1334.  Bob and I also had a tea ceremony before we returned to Tokyo.

Bob isn’t as old as I, and wanted to see more modern things.  So on the last day of our visit, we spent the afternoon looking at ham radio electronics, and then at other consumer electronics in Electronic Town (Akihabara) in Tokyo.  I think we were both impressed with the modern toilets on display.

Last month Tekmos traveled to exhibit at another high temperature conference. This time it was the GEA Geothermal Energy Expo 2014 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. The expo is billed as "the world's largest gathering of vendors providing support for geothermal resource exploration, characterization, development, production and management." Since the folks from Tekmos have spent most of their careers involved with microelectronics, it was fascinating to talk with the attendees and vendors who manufacture and use the massive equipment associated with the geothermal industry. Even though the exploration for and harnessing of geothermal energy makes use of equipment that is thousands of times bigger than our microelectronic circuitry, many pieces of equipment cannot function without the much smaller electronic components like those that Tekmos designs and manufactures.

The expo gave us a chance to talk in depth with various equipment vendors about the performance and electrical characteristics they need most when choosing components for their new products. We were again reminded of the need to listen carefully and to clarify terms. Some of the vendors at the Expo talked about their requirement for maximum operating temperatures of 300 degrees without mentioning they were speaking in degrees Fahrenheit. Others at the conference needed 250 degrees operating temperature, without mentioning they were speaking in degrees Celsius, the units generally used in the electronics industry. The 300 degrees Fahrenheit, about 150 degrees Celsius, is pretty straight forward for Tekmos using standard bulk silicon technology but 250 degrees Celsius will require our SOI processing.

This second high temperature conference of the year for Tekmos yielded a number of new contacts as well as a chance to visit with other customers that we have known for some time. We also received a number of inquiries about our standard products where the high temperatures are not required. There were even some inquiries about Tekmos supplying parts that are going obsolete by the original vendors. While this has been a major focus of Tekmos throughout its 17 year history, we were a little surprised since our focus at this geothermal conference was "Hot Chips", our relatively recent thrust into the high temperature market.

As we often do, we also took some time to visit a local attraction. We had a tasty lunch at a great Chinese restaurant suggested to us by a local who thought we looked lost as we got off the light rail. We were primed for our visit to Portland's Lan Su Chinese Garden, the most authentic Suzhou-style Chinese garden outside China. Its name is poetically interpreted as "Garden of Awakening Orchids." It was assembled by 65 Chinese artisans who spent 10 months assembling and completing structures that were crafted in China. From the Hall of Brocade Clouds, past the Scholars Courtyard, to the Tower of Cosmic Reflections, the Garden is a sea of tranquility near center of the bustling city of Portland. It was a welcome period of peace and quiet between our travel to Portland and our manning the booth at the Geothermal Expo.

When it comes to reasons for Tekmos Team Members to gather for good food and celebration, they can always be invented, but this event was for our nation’s birth, the 4th of July, and a 3 day weekend. Every holiday Tekmos staff have a “potluck dinner” where each brings a favorite dish or, if one is culinary challenged, bring chips, corn on the cob or a store bought banana cream cake. Everyone is expected to pitch in.

On the menu for this 4th of July BBQ were hamburgers, bratwurst, corn on the cob, homemade potato salad by Alison, deviled eggs by Lynn, and celebratory mozzarella and cherry tomato hors d’oeuvre by Carole, hot artichoke spinach dip with grilled pita bread by Leslie, cole slaw by Zeta, and homemade apple pie by Jon’s son, Ryan.

Food specialties were shared from favorite family traditions and recipes. The designated Tekmos griller is Phil, Tekmos’ all around machine guru. Phil’s family owned a steak house so it was only natural that he would take Bison burger and hamburger to make specialty burgers. An added bonus is that Bison is a very lean meat and healthier. They were cooked to perfection.

The piece de resistance of the 4th of July Barbecue was Jon’s son, Ryan’s homemade apple pie, a recipe passed down from his great grandmother. The apple pies were served with fresh whipped cream, not from the container.

The 4th of July annual celebration of the founding of our nation is often celebrated with fireworks, picnics, barbecues, and favorite summertime dishes of hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad and apple pie. You can’t get more American than that.

Business trips are usually intense.  You work hard, and are frequently up late in the evening.

To compensate for this, we try to add a little extra to each trip.  This month, four of us went to the HiTec conference in Albuquerque.  We had free time for dinners, and 5 hours at the end of the conference, between the show closing at noon, and having to be at the airport at 5.  That was plenty of additional time for something extra.

Albuquerque has a 10K foot mountain in the city limits, called Sandia Peak.  There is a restaurant located on top of it, which you access by a tram.  We decided to have our Wednesday dinner on top of the mountain.  It was a beautiful 20 minute tram ride up there.  Once there, we were unable to eat due to lack of reservations, so we went to the bar, and ate off of the bar menu.  I also had a conference call while up there, which I took while standing on a rock ledge, overlooking Albuquerque 5,000 feet below.  It was cold up there, and there was still snow on the ground.  But the views were incredible, and well worth the cold.  We stayed up there until dusk, and then took the tram back to the car.

After the conference ended, we went to see the Petroglyph National Monument.  This monument contains a number of Indian petroglyphs dating from 1300 AD that are carved into blocks of lava on the west side of Albuquerque.  We walked along several of the trails, checking out the petroglyphs.  There were hundreds of them to view. Being an amateur geologist, I was also impressed by the lava flow.  We were in a small canyon that at one time had been a hill.  The lava had flowed on either side of the hill.  In a mere 200,000 years, the hill had eroded, leaving the canyon we were in.

After checking that out, we toured the National Atomic Museum.  This is much better suited for engineering nerds, with its collection of rockets, old airplanes, bomb casings, and old radios.  I particularly enjoyed studying the engines of a Titan II rocket.  I had seen a detailed description of the SpaceX rocket engine, and so I knew what I was looking at.  It was also interesting to study the avionics and wiring harnesses used in the planes and rockets.