Derek
As a kid I was fascinated by how things worked and always wanted to see what made them tick. To the joy of my parents, any new electronic device that came into the house, I took apart. Radios, VCRs, amplifiers, CD players, basically anything I could get my hands on. Of course, then one has to put it back together, usually with a few extra screws left over. I first caught the electronics bug after repairing a radio with a cracked PCB. From then on I was obsessed with learning about electronics, building and making things from scratch.
I started working in the semiconductor industry out of high school, specifically plasma gate etch, manufacturing DSP chips. During that time I learned about the general physics of semiconductor devices, how to operate process equipment, electron microscopes and various other metrology equipment. I was lucky in that the company I worked for paid for college so in parallel, studied electronics & embedded systems. This allowed me to graduate from manufacturing to process engineering, and ultimately product engineering where I worked with parametric automated test equipment.
I've also spent some time working with fiber-optic erbium doped fiber amplifiers, and failure analysis of DC-DC converters.
Nowadays I'm a robotics applications engineer involved in designing wireless sensor systems and programming of semiconductor robots; The type you'd find in cleanroom semiconductor process equipment. By night I run a YouTube channel, The Current Source, where I make stuff and try to explain the ins and outs of electronics.
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