Special Feature
“Sometimes we
worked 24 hours
at a stretch.
Because of this
constant, dayand-night work,
some fellows
had to postpone,
change or even
cancel their personal schedules
or plans.”
Best
Development
Teams
By Brian Fuller
T
hey were huddled in the corner
of the lab or in the engineering
area. They were usually the first
into the building in the morning
and the last out at night. They
consumed more coffee, tea, Red Bull, pizza,
snacks, beer and aspirin than any other
employee group. At the end of the project,
most team members got an “attaboy,” maybe
some comp time; a few got a nice bonus.
They were—and are—in it for the adventure, as the old Marines recruitment ad put
it. Their reward was solving any number of
problems that, at the outset of the project,
had roughly the consistency of a big brick
wall. The glory went to the marketing and
sales guys who took their baby out into the
world, flash bulbs popping, to tell the story
of the new product.
But who would tell the story of the engi-
www.eet.com
neers and the process—the hopes, dreams,
anguish, anxiety, fears and, ultimately, success? They would, and so would EE Times.
To that end, we went directly to design
teams around the world to make their voices
heard in an attempt to scope out the Best in
Class Design Teams in electronics today.
Speak they did—passionately, eloquently, technically.
“Rules? Why would I need any rules?
Don’t those manufacturing guys get it?” said
one engineer. Another team invoked James
Bond in its work: “The experience was a
total adrenaline rush for the group, leaving
Team-Q stirred, but not shaken.”
Some teams were so passionate in their
descriptions they couldn’t keep to the 700word limit for submitted nominations. Others were so precise they noted their word
count at the submission’s end: 699 words.
Some teams were so small they could fit
comfortably in a phone booth; others were
the size of small towns. Transglobal collaboration, with few exceptions, was the name of
the game. The average number of design
sites for a given team was three.
The teams we heard from included a total
of more than 1,600 engineers, in dozens of
countries, working the equivalent of 43 years
on their projects. Look carefully at the pictures
that illustrate this special section. You’ll see
smiling, confident engineers, backs straight
and proud—and engineers hunched over
their work, designing, innovating.
“I find that the great thing in this world
is not so much where we stand as in what
direction we are moving,” Oliver Wendell
Holmes once said. “To reach the port of
heaven, we must sail sometimes with the
wind and sometimes against it—but we
must sail and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”
If you have any question about where the
future of innovation lies, look no further
than the following pages.
November 29, 2004 | Electronic Engineering Times
55
Special Feature
Best Development Teams
Texas Instruments and ObjectVideo
Video content analysis algorithms
for digital media processors
Team: Yvonne Cager, DSP video solutions marketing manager,
TI; Aziz Chihoub, embedded developer, OV; Andy Chosak, lead
developer, OV; Bob Cutting, project manager, OV; Alan Lipton,
chief technology officer, OV; Don Madden, developer, OV; Amit
Mistry, embedded lead developer, OV; Cheng Peng, lead developer and application engineer, TI; Weihong Yin, developer, OV
Project duration: June 7, 2004 to Sept. 22, 2004
Tools: Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, TI Code Composer Studio,
TI DM642 EVM
Sites: Main location, Dallas. Reston, Va.; Stafford, Texas;
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Biggest hurdle: Limited resources had the team working on
the project while moving ahead with individual responsibilities for customer technical support and other product development. The TI and ObjectVideo teams had to cooperate while not sharing proprietary information about their respective companies’ technologies.
Judges’ comments: Texas Instruments designers and ObjectVideo developers jointly devised video content analysis
algorithms that would run on TI’s digital media processors. As they transitioned ObjectVideo’s PC code to a DSP-specific
code library, team members followed the waterfall methodology by performing regression testing at every stage of the
design cycle against the PC code baseline to ensure that no bugs or performance degradation had been introduced.
Porting ObjectVideo’s video surveillance algorithms to TI’s processors enables the analytical capabilities to reside directly on devices, such as video cameras, digital video recorders, network encoders or other video management platforms.
Distributing those capabilities throughout a security system diminishes the need for a centralized server and reduces
the hardware requirements for an intelligent security system, thereby paring overall system requirements and the overall cost of ownership for the end user.
76 Electronic Engineering Times | November 29, 2004
“G
iven the aggressive
time frame of only
four months, the
combined team
diligently defined
the project scope,
plans and
resources.”
www.eet.com