Hi I'm here with John Kenny one of the old guard is that the correct term from HP I Guess nice. Yeah no no this case oil stuff. he's an original. HP guys are yours 237 40 40 G's you get less for murder? No I say you're right.

you're a company man. Full knowledge if since college. that's right. Excellent.

Well let's tell us how did you start it HP and what you're do these days. So I started at HP because I wanted to be in the audio business because I love music and I went to the interview there and I discovered the power supply. so just like audio, big heatsinks, power transistors, transformers, you know, low frequency signal processing and uh, all my control theory came into hand. So I started designing power products for many years discovered I like the firmware side of it.

After a while got into firmware and then a lot of our firmware technology has moved into digital and FPGA so I got into that and then I got into management because I knew all the different areas and I could tell people they were full of it when they tell me it was it and from there I went from Power Product management into product line management where I got involved with the volt mirrors, the function generators, the data act those teams. So a lot of the products now and I've actually done designed with them because of common components. My job today is more or less I Like to think of it somebody who moves from project team the project team well throughout the company finding technology that someone's developed it's the best and then transferring it through the different organizations. Got it.

So what is your title these days? Technology and Efficiency Management Efficiency. I'm going to assume that efficiency does not mean power efficiency. Absolutely not. No, it means it means getting more products out for the same engineering, not less money for the same products, more audits for the same engineering.

So for example the the 34 460 front panel yeah, that design is now used in I Guess about six or seven products, right? So that was a deliberate push to go in that direction. Correct. doing that more and more. Try that.

So we make RSM use use the same internal technology for some of those pieces as our voltmeters as encounters function generators. We've actually got a new a lower-cost one that we use in the new power supplies, right? Because it wasn't priced rate for the price points we have to hit for power products, we actually took it to add another price point and that's gonna be spread through many products in the future interested in. So when did that sort of focus change when ya decided? Look, we need a common about, you know, or or is it always been around in some form. Well, there was the original 34401a meter.

Yep, that technology spread into probably eight or ten products. The Data Act products were based on that. The Nano Volt meter was based on that. Believe it or not, the 36:31 power supply actually has the Volt Meter chipset inside of it.

So they did it a long time ago and somehow when we got the small part of a bigger company like Gila Packard that's to fill out a favor. We were starving those teams. Now we're kind of bringing back that the Renaissance if you will of these products to make them more efficient to make cover more space. And now that we're solely a test a measurement company, we're not giving all our money to start life sciences or computer companies and we're really free, focusing and growing the company again.

It's a lot more exciting today that it was ten fifteen years ago. Interesting. So you started in 78, Correct 1978 Straight out of college? That's right. Did they recruit you? Did they come into the colleges and recruit? Or how did that? they did? But I went to Lehigh University and they didn't recruited Lehigh They rented at some of the bigger schools.

so luckily the Power Products development was done in New Jersey and I had born and raised in New Jersey. He was right down the road from me so it was an easy play. I don't know they ever did anything in New Jersey We used to have a very large manufacturing center in New Jersey that's all in Penang Rylan We moved everything to Penang for efficiency I had nothing to do with that. Yeah, but we've got rid of most of the US manufacturing.

In fact the Volt meters were originally manufactured in Loveland where the team was the ours product I thought that was the army design group was in Loveland really all the main one where where were the design centers? Well even at its peak when we were you look back organic probably 30 or 40 designs hosel today if you take the RF off the plate. Yeah and the Scopes we have design centers in Loveland we have it in bud Lake New Jersey we have Penang Hochy Oh cheese and we have Singapore. All right so that's everything that's not our F is stunning. Those five design centers very interesting why so many designs hit us back in the day? was it so it's really scared of the jobs around was I don't know.

Bill and Dave were amazing guys and one of the things they really believed in in order to foster the maximum out of innovation was diversity. So as soon as a site got above a certain size, they would cleave off a piece of it like a piece of dough and stick it somewhere else and let it grow into a new site. So we started organizations in Loveland, started organizations in Spokane Washington and then Lake Stevens and the computer group did the same. They would get to a certain size and then they'd spin off another group in a new location near a different set of universities to get a different pool of Technology and got it.

And that was a great thing for the day when innovation and design was really all that mattered. Yep, today, it's somewhat of a blessing and a curse and the ability for people to get efficiency compared to some of our competition. It's much more difficult because everybody does their own thing and you don't get common design. You don't get common parts.

You don't get shared knowledge as much as some of our competitors who are all located in one building down in Austin or maybe in Germany somewhere. They're much more vertically integrated and they can enforce common common design practices. Raaah. Interesting.

So did you know Bill and Dave? Well, they still. that was still technically there in the late seventies. It was still there in the late Yes. I Met both of them once, but it was very, you know I was I was on Simonetta.

My boss at the time was working on the HP 3000 computers. Yeah, Bill. he came to visit and to go over some negotiations and some technical stuff with him and I'm sitting at my bench and Austin Daye there's somebody I'd like you to meet. My turnaround is there for about a year when that happened, but they would come back in the day they would come to all the sites.

Yeah, there weren't as many. Of course David come to all the sites once a year and visit everybody and in fact our CEO Ron or seccion who was actually from learning Jersey Power Products Group originally I worked with him for quite quite a few years went to school with him not with him, he went through the same university I did just came back to our site so we're kind of bringing back some of the dorm Dave cases to make sure that we're all one company that was the management by walking about principle which became famous I guess we're trying to recover some of the goods through. we are kind regional you look Packard Yes right now the ball. let's talk about the spin-offs.

How when did they happen? How why obviously the first so what's your packet? Until then it changed to Agilent how did that go down? Was it well received internally? Was it it was very interesting transition that was the the Carly days some of the darkest things of you love Packard and yeah I think it was one of the board members was you-let's son Walter Ulid I think it was right and he was very much afraid that Carly was gonna gobble up and destroy everything in her zeal to be ambitious and grow well. As you know, fear we're talking about the test and measurement stuff right? That would be gobbled up that we all have been shut down and getting into a super cash cow and he didn't want that to happen. So yeah, they made a decision to spin us off the the Life Sciences and the Test and Measurement into a solely separate entity. So yeah, Computer Group could be completely independent and part of that is.

Also, you know the the stock market wants a clean concept for a company so they know how to put it in their portfolio the right way. Yeah, HP was big. It had its tentacles in so many different areas that would have been I right hinderance, right? Well the biggest thing really was the market drivers. I was explaining this to Simon that when you're a portfolio manager, you want to have a certain splitter, this kind of stock and this kind of stock in this gonna stock and we represent a problem for those people.

because we're not a kind of stock, we're a multi conglomerate. Now if we're bigger and a true conglomerate like a GE or a Danaher, those companies are not renowned for the products they make the Reno Not a businessman Yes, Okay, and they keep companies as long as they can milk them and make money. But as soon as they not number one and number two, how'd they go like that? Her just denna her business system. Yes, G Business system.

Yeah, we didn't want to become that. so they spun us off as a wholly separate entity and it worked for a while as Agilent. But then it was also a problem. We were a life sciences and a test and measurement company.

Yeah, which one are you and there's hurting the test a measurement part quite a bit because every dollar we made we were becoming a cash cow to fund this growing lifestyle. So they made a decision that you know that was gonna hurt us and we were actually gonna be a liability. So they spun us off again eski and now we're a pure TNM play and we love about it. Being part of that test and measurement business is we're really focused Now we're really a hundred percent of every dollar we make goes back to making us grow in the test of measurement space.

Nothing else, nothing else distracts you. HP Started out as a test and measurement company. Mm-hmm did. Were they disappoint and they didn't get the HP name? No, that had or had been had it being corrupted by the computer? No, no, we would have loved to have the EULA Packard Me: Yep, Some of our competitors have said would you trust somebody who's changed the name three times names don't care for that but it's taken.

Its cost us a negative if you will to have to change things and build up that brand reputation again I Think we're at the point now where it's not likely to happen again. We'll grow it back and we're fine. It's a good name, we don't have any issues with it. Um, it's not something we'd like to have done done, but um and we certainly wish we kept the ELA Packard name because there would you.

Bill and Dave are still yeah I guess he famous everywhere you go there in the owned for creating Silicon Valley and Mm-hm and spinning off some of the largest companies in the world. I mean Apple was started by youlet Packard Yep, sorry yeah, did you know you wouldn't have known was back in the day when they could see us it was no one in a vision. He was portable right? so everyone was disappointing. HP did they like the name Angela I I didn't mind I thought it was okay I didn't really have anything angela against it I Think the only negative was that right before we spun off AT&T splintered into many companies and one of those companies was Lucent so not Agilent and loosen didn't do well.

As you probably know, they got gobbled up eventually by Alcatel and for pennies on the dollar. So this this naming thing seemed kind of fake. Keycite name was viewed much better. Also, it was viewed better internally because outside it was a bit of a almost like key site.

It was like designed by committee or something. no nothing. naming his table we don't have done Dave was great. In fact, Eula Packard is a funny story because for years it was Hewlett Packard you weren't allowed to call it in any advertising HP Right Interests literally.

The the day that Bill EULA passed away yeah, they started at HP Carly wanted to call it okay, he passed away and interests. She immediately demanded that everything started becoming HP because it's hard. That's why even the industry is just. it's just high-speed right? They really see my name on the company and say the whole era I didn't totally understand it.

Yeah, why not? Mm-hmm you're the one in charge, right? I Think part of the Keysight name is also the Keysight look. As you see, we're changing all of our products to the black and red and a lot of that was perceived negatively by the engineers because it's work Wray requires us to change everything and it's been a challenge to get the user interface the mmm-hmm the look and feel right and the black on black has been a challenge. It's getting better. I Think the thing that we people are starting to see though is it makes us us.

you're becoming our identity. It's a fresh new start. and I think that's starting to become received more positively. It's taking time.

It's cost money in it. One of the things that does take your eye off the ball you're You're busy focusing on the way things look as in colors as opposed to how good is the product. so there is a cost to it. but I think it's gonna be a transitory cost Do you when you're making a huge transition like that name? sorry did the black look-and-feel come after after they came after we started I thought sorry, why did you think that you needed a new look and feel? Well, we wanted to be ourselves.

we were our own company. we weren't they, everybody else has copied us, or all these other products have that beige look. we invented that and we're ready to be the the new Keysight. and this is really kind of tracing your own turf.

And yeah, I said it's taken a while, but it's nice starting to have a positive impact. Do you do something like that internally? Or do you just hire consulting like a brand consulting companies to do to us done internally? Yeah, okay. in fact, there was something that Ron really wanted to do Rhonda says he ignores. All right, yeah, and his staff.

They really felt it was important for us to make our new mark to let send a strong message to the world and to us internally that we are now Impurity Measurement Company and we're ourselves. We're not part of anything else. we're just ourselves. Fantastic Yes! and it shows in all the decisions.

I'm very happy with some of the direction we've shifted to. the renewed focus on a lot of our products, a greater amount of investment and all that money we're not giving to Life Sciences is going back into the company. So how is Keysight doing financially? So III haven't they are. They still like a very profitable.

The challenge has been transitioning from a cash cow which generates a big profit to a profit and growth play. Okay, so now we're really starting to grow. We're making our numbers every quarter for six straight quarters. No, our stock is up nicely.

Yeah, that's really what we want. That's what. There's no question about it and we have a lot more to go. Is there any pressure from being a publicly listed company to kill off things that aren't very profitable? Or do you can you get by with you know things that I get like like products you really like but they're not really profit or is every successful The public.

The stock market doesn't look at that closely and I can look at the Argan total. Yep and they expect you to understand. make the moves you have to make to make change, do that. and we are very ruthless about that.

If we do things that aren't making sense, we don't want them in our portfolio, makes our numbers look bad and our results right. and we're not generating funding for new things we don't want to keep it in there. We don't even market to tell us that. So you started out as a technical guy.

Absolutely. Are you still? Do You still get your hands dirty? Or one of the things I tell people is I like to keep my feet on the street. So at that 34 460 front panel I designed that oh you designed that by design the front peddled Simon Give us the made-up and again it was an interesting story because we had a lot of price pressure on that to replace the 34401a most successful product in Testan red ELA Packard Test and Measurement history. It was the most successful product, sold more logos.

Yep on that 34 401 It was by far and away at its peak. We sold over 25,000 a year. 25 and how long ago it was on the mark of a tweeny over 84. Wow Wow So you actually designed.

I design your electronics for the yep-yep fan test. Oh you actually designed the electronics. that's correct for the front Wow There you go. You're the manager.

you're how high are you? you up the other I'm the hub the second highest level of individual I Don't have direct reports I influence I'm a strong influence or a lot of different organization? Yes. But what this team needed was they needed a product that was modern enough to really replace the 34410. Yeah, he didn't know how to meet the cost, they didn't know how to add the functionality and I got together with him and we came up with a super simple, clean design. Yeah, one of the benefits coming from the power product side was power products are the most attacked from underneath of all of our product lines so we were sensitive.

it cost and more aware of how to get low cost than probably all the other product classes. and this team when they developed three for 401, they did the most amazing job. Look at that design. it's just one of the most elegant, simple, clean, just enough to get the job done right.

And when we went to do this, they were struggling to figure out how to get that same elegance. Yep, and that's was my job was to come in and help them achieve that. Now they had to do the same thing on the Voltmeter technology inside. I Did not get directly involved in that, right? and they did an amazing job on that.

I Mean this Voltmeter is simple and it's clean as the 34411 this day, but the combination of two they've never taken this technology and brought into all of our other products. Okay, and that's really what's made a difference. Now it's when I say efficiency. Its its efficiency in the development cost of the products to get as much shared reuse across all those different products.

and also because when our customers use this, the expectation is they going to use that it works the same. It's easy to already know how it works. Yep, and that's that's another efficiency Because what we had in the past was each group would develop their own web browser interface, their own file manager interface, throne, firmware update method you know, and our customers just go. It's not.

CEA Well, it's also hard for us to keep the quality of that very high. We're testing three times. four times as many things. Yeah, my job is to shut down the multiple different ways of doing things and make it one way.

That's the best way. Yep, so you late, you designed the front panel electronics. You laid out the board. Mm-hmm Wow I'm stumped.

Thank you. Very much impressed. I'm impressed. Oh yeah, that's somebody that high up.

Would you know? did you like? obviously people? You had no shortage of people who could have done that. But did you go? Surprisingly enough, the thing that was the reason I got involved it was because they didn't know how to meet the cost calls we had to hit. Huh? So they could do that. This front panel assembly cost about $65 The board and the loading of the board and the design they came up with was about $59 but instead of being a vacuum instead of being an LCD it was a vacuum fluorescent.

They said you can't put out a product and in 2010 without a color. LCD And we worked very hard and some of the team did a lot work to find a vendor that made a high quality display that was low cost and we came up with an integrated design. We actually had to work with our internal people to to use a lower cost processor and reuse parts count and that's something I have a lot of familiarity with God Society You thought you can do the job really well and you went in there and did it. We did it and then What's fun about it now is they now are much more dangerous about doing low-cost and minimal design than we were in the past.

So that's continued through a lot of the other products. I only have to do it once and show them the way and then they can follow it from there. And the funny thing was on the original 34411 was done, those guys were aces at it. they just they were amazing at it.

But what happened was we moved all our manufacturing to Penang Yep and it's much more difficult for people to get on planes and fly. you know, 30 hours to Koh Chang I was already doing that quite a bit I work with the Penang teeny little low-cost products so I had a lot of that knowledge and I was still going over there I Brought a lot of that to them and helped share that we've taken this design now and propagated it through our Japanese organization which I'm visiting later this week. Our Penang organization does it a lot and we're looking at other products. We can implement it in these lower cost methodologies.

Fantastic! So when was this originally consuming? did you start working on this? I Guess. But ten years ago, oh boy. and when did it come out 16 years ago? I Don't know the exact D prime. So what? What is the development cycle? Well for this because this was a completely new product from the ground up.

Basically, was it almost? It's you use some of the old sampling architecture I Think yes, it's not the site, but I'm not using an ASIC the original 1304 one use an ASIC an ASIC Costs have skyrocketed and you can now do more with off-the-shelf than you could. The quality of the components and the the switches and things like that. You don't have to get performance anymore. So this is done with discrete off-the-shelf parts.

There's a custom FPGA inside. Yeah, that's about it. This was one question on the forum. Somebody asked FPGA versus ASIC this that in these days I mean yeah.

HP did a lot of Asics We had our own internal IC We still didn't have our own internal I seen my facilities but as the nanometers have shrunk yeah asks that costs have risen dramatically. Got it? Okay, and where we used to do analog in analog Asics To get matching of resistors and things like that today? you can buy that, right? Yeah, you can buy an off-the-shelf point I one percent resistor and and switches. can you leakages and things like that And the resistance of the switches is much better. Yeah, before you had to do an ASIC dig that level of performance, Got it? So is there any? Well I power from the Scopes which have the mega zoom? Let's see.

Okay so you had to develop their customers. Yes, they have a custom-made at the end of custom digital lace Yep that takes the data real-time to gigahertz sample rates and actually built the entire display in the ASIC Yes, we have to give you that in case you have to get that performance that instant response performance thing. But on instruments like the ones you work on because you're not in the oscilloscope division, you're in the what do your part of the is G which is you know, electronic instruments and Systems group is you know, Voltmeters, counters, function generators, data acquisition wise Sm use so not gog team of board test anything that's not RF or super high-speed it's in. The company deliberately differentiates scopes because they're essentially are their RF time, their high speed super super high speed, high speed RF and also stuff.

Most of the scopes are kind of divided into halves. We have our high performance group and we have a high volume group got okay and the high performance group is chasing the 60 gigahertz plus to test the latest PCI Express and add dot. whatever it is yeah you know in the super fast EDR memories that's price is secondary to performance. And those guys the high-volume scope guys is prices.

Everything there. They are as good as or better than anybody in the company Hitting price points. They're amazing I Work closely with them to understand the tricks they've learned. so I can pick them up and bring them in to these guys.

So mostly you'd be taking FPGAs these day because they're but they're still not cheap in volume. Are they like for a decent-sized one? they're not. So what's happened is is they shrink the processed geometry of an FPGA You get more for the same amount of money? Yep. But the price doesn't drop.

You get more and more transistors. Yeah. And one of the interesting technological challenges with FPGA is is figuring out how to take advantage of all those transistors. And that means we have to move more and more of the functionality of the product into the digital domain.

Yep, Now the good news is, that's the general trend. So in Power Products, for example, we're used to all analog feedback. We're moving almost all our new designs. or there's all my store digital, right? And I mean that an FPGA is today.

But there's a new technology not new per se, but the one that's coming on very strong. and that is, you know, Ti and other companies are coming out with better and better DSP technology. Yeah, and they're They're competing with the low end of the FPGA market. In fact, a lot of our PJs we build micro processors inside the FPGA and soft to get state machines and things like that.

So the challenge is, what can you do with all those those gates and all those multipliers and accumulators and stuff to get more and more functionality? So you're from a power background? That's where you starting in the power group. What are the idea? Do you prefer the analog stuff? or do you think that indoor? Do you see advantages in the new DSP digital approach to power supply? Digital. Also, the performance there, the response is better, the stability is better in digital, Well, digital. With people first started to do digital, they basically implemented analog circuits in digital.

So they took an Op-amp integrator and they MPI didn't a the accumulator in a digital domain. All right, it's way more expensive to do. Yeah, yeah, but now we're doing things like dynamic compensation. It has changes of the operating point.

We do a lot of switching power supply design. We make the switching power supplies that people think are linear supplies, they have low noise, and they're super fast, fast transient response. and we can do things in digital that we couldn't do in that log and we do it more precisely. Yeah, and we can simulate a lot of this stuff in the analog domain.

It was much more difficult to simulate to get accurate characteristics of transistors. We now can correct for an anomalies we couldn't correct for for and get higher performance, more efficiency and there's no end of what we can do with it. I Mean it's really the sky's the limit because in the like of the real high performance inverters, industrial inverters, and things like that, they digitally characterize individual transistors and you can get the most efficiency out of. Are you guys doing stuff like that? Yeah, we just came out with a a very high voltage, very high power supply to serve the automotive electric vehicle market and we're doing fully bi-directional power transfer.

Yep, and we're mapping into the line. Yeah, dumping power back in the line. When you're when you're sobriety out of it and we're putting power back in off the line with 100% power factor, all done digitally. That's it.

Really, you can get higher and higher levels of efficiency because frankly, when you're talking about a hundred thousand watts, yeah, you don't care for that heat. No, every point 1% of efficiency matters at that. Well, the bigger problem that when they're testing these things in production, they would have to put liquid cooling towers and they take nothing out of the room because it would get to 120 Wow So that by putting the energy back on the line. Yep, they can dramatically simplify the manufacturing process.

Fantastic. And you know factories don't care so much about efficiency. No, they're not in terms of how much power costs are, but they do care about Heat Yes, you see and noise and just the mess it comes from it. So that's but the thing I was getting back to the original question the the the digital domain allows us to do things we couldn't do in analog that wasn't predictable.

Well, I Liked accurate nonlinear feedback. Yep, okay to do it on your feedback in the analog domain. you fault diodes, nasty stuff. Yes, Drift.

Precisely digital. You have 16-bit accuracy I'm very high bandwidth and it's very, very predictable and malleable, so it's much much better. It's just we're learning how to develop the tools and the simulation technologies. The simulation technologies take a lot of computer horsepower so we were costly buying new servers, new tools, faster tools.

You can actually even ship the stuff off to people like Amazon and Google and use their servers modulations. We're starting to do that, but it getting our minds wrapped around it so everybody's adept. I Can't tell you how often I take a guy out of school who knows the Antelope cuz you have to start there and I say but you're never gonna use this. You're gonna have to understand it.

but you're gonna do it all in digital demand. You have to become an expert on FPGAs And they go. Oh I Shocked. But now I See well I Thought it'd be the opposite I Thought they'd be turned churning out the digital gurus and nobody knows analog anymore.

Nobody. Well, the point is, we hire. We try to hire any drivers. hence these people because you need to have that quality standing before you go to the digital.

You just can't send a digital jockey at the thing and expect them to come up with a good result. They have to have that interest, loop gain, and all those things still live. It's stunning the software domain and it's compensated for in that case. But I still have to understand the principles of how it all works and what not.

And we're not the only ones. I Mean obviously our competitors are doing it as well. And what's also interesting is you can provide some of that to the customer. You can provide the adaptability that Digital brings to bear in a soft fashion to the customer so they can trade off stability versus dynamics and in some of our competitors offer that as well.

And it's really allowing you to get more out of what you already have. Fantastic tomorrow! I Think we're gonna call it quits though. We? yeah, thank you very much. John it's been awesome.

Thanks for coming all the way here to give us a do it again sometime. Yes, didn't catch you next time. Awesome! Hey, that was quite good and it was recording the whole time. Yep, you.