Overcoming Systemic Racism Through System Engineering

Getting these clients would require abandoning the corporate’s mechanical inertial-sensor methods in favor of a brand new, unproven quartz know-how, miniaturizing the quartz sensors, and turning a producer of tens of 1000’s of high-priced sensors a yr right into a producer of hundreds of thousands of cheaper ones.

Madni led an all-hands push to make that occur—and succeeded past what anybody might have imagined with
the GyroChip. This cheap inertial-measurement sensor was the primary such system to be integrated into cars, enabling digital stability-control (ESC) methods to detect skidding and function the brakes to stop rollover accidents. According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, within the five-year interval spanning 2011 to 2015, with ESCs being constructed into all new vehicles, the methods saved 7,000 lives within the United States alone.

The system went on to function the center of stability-control methods in numerous industrial and personal plane and U.S. missile steerage methods, too. It even traveled to Mars as a part of the
Pathfinder Sojourner rover.

For pioneering the GyroChip, and for different contributions in know-how growth and analysis management, Madni acquired
the 2022 IEEE Medal of Honor.

Engineering wasn’t Madni’s first alternative of occupation. He needed to be a positive artist—a painter. But his household’s financial scenario in Mumbai, India (then Bombay) within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties steered him to engineering—particularly electronics, because of his curiosity in latest improvements embodied within the pocket-size transistor radio. In 1966 he moved to the United States to review electronics at the RCA Institutes in New York City, a college created within the early 1900s to coach wi-fi operators and technicians.

“I wanted to be an engineer who would invent things,” Madni says, “one who would do things that would eventually affect humanity. Because if I couldn’t affect humanity, I felt that I would have an unfulfilling career.”

After two years finishing the electronics know-how program on the RCA Institutes, Madni went on to
the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), receiving a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1969. He continued on to a grasp’s and a Ph.D., utilizing digital sign processing together with frequency-domain reflectometry to research telecommunications methods for his dissertation analysis. While finding out, he additionally labored variously at Pacific States University as an teacher, at Beverly Hills retailer David Orgell in stock administration, and at Pertec as an engineer designing laptop peripherals.

Then, in 1975, newly engaged and on the insistence of a former classmate, he utilized for a job in Systron Donner’s microwave division.

Madni’s began at Systron Donner by designing the world’s first spectrum analyzer with digital storage. He had by no means truly used a spectrum analyzer earlier than—these had been very costly devices on the time—however he knew sufficient concerning the concept to speak himself into the job. He then spent six months working in testing, choosing up sensible expertise with the devices earlier than trying to revamp one.

The venture took two years and, Madni studies, led to a few vital patents that began his climb “to bigger and better things.” It additionally taught him, he says, an appreciation for the distinction between “what it is to have theoretical knowledge and what it is to commercialize technology that can be helpful to others.”

He went on to develop quite a few RF and microwave methods and instrumentation for the U.S. navy, together with an analyzer for communications strains and connected antennas constructed for the Navy, which grew to become the premise for his doctoral analysis.

Though he moved rapidly into the administration ranks, finally climbing to chairman, president, and CEO of Systron Donner, former colleagues say he by no means solely left the lab behind. His technical mark was on each venture he grew to become concerned in, together with the groundbreaking work that led to the GyroChip.

Before we speakabout the little quartz sensor that grew to become the center of the GyroChip, right here’s a little bit background on the inertial-measurement models of the Nineties. An IMU measures a number of properties of an object: its particular pressure (the acceleration that’s not as a consequence of gravity); its angular charge of rotation round an axis; and, typically, its orientation in three-dimensional house.

The GyroChip enabled digital stability-control methods in cars to detect skidding and prevented numerous rollover accidents. Peter Adams

In the early Nineties, the everyday IMU used mechanical gyroscopes for angular-rate sensing. A bundle with three extremely correct spinning mass gyroscopes was concerning the measurement of a toaster oven and weighed a few kilogram. Versions that used ring-laser gyroscopes or fiber-optic gyroscopes had been considerably smaller, however all high-accuracy optical and mechanical gyros of the time value 1000’s of {dollars}.

So that was the IMU in 1990, when Systron Donner bought its defense-electronics companies to BEI Technologies, a publicly traded spinoff of BEI Electronics, itself a by-product of the venerable Baldwin Piano Co. The system was massive, heavy, costly, and held transferring mechanical components that suffered from put on and tear, affecting reliability.

Shortly earlier than the sale, Systron Donner had licensed a patent for a totally totally different sort of charge sensor from a gaggle of U.S. inventors. It was little greater than a paper design on the time, Madni says, however the firm had began investing a few of its R&D funds in implementing the know-how.

The design centered on a tiny, dual-ended vibrating tuning fork carved out of quartz utilizing normal silicon-wafer-processing methods. The tines of the fork can be deflected by the Coriolis impact, the inertial pressure appearing on an object because it resists being pulled from its aircraft of rotation. Because quartz has piezoelectric properties, adjustments in forces appearing upon it trigger adjustments in electrical cost. These adjustments could possibly be transformed into measurements of angular velocity.

The venture continued after Systron Donner’s divisions grew to become a part of BEI, and within the early Nineties BEI was manufacturing some 10,000 quartz gyroscopic sensors yearly for a categorized protection venture. But with the autumn of the Soviet Union and ensuing speedy contraction of the U.S. protection business, Madni fearful that there can be no extra clients—no less than for a very long time—for these tiny new sensors and even for the standard mechanical sensors that had been the principle a part of the division’s enterprise.

“We had two options,” Madni remembers. “We stick out in the sands and peacefully die, which would be a shame, because nobody else has this technology. Or we find somewhere else we can use it.”

“If I couldn’t affect humanity, I felt that I would have an unfulfilling career.”

The hunt was on. Madni says he and members of his analysis and advertising groups went to each sensors convention they might discover, speaking to anybody who used inertial sensors, no matter whether or not the functions had been industrial, industrial, or house. They confirmed the quartz angular-rate sensors the corporate had developed, touting their worth, precision, and reliability, and laid out a path through which the units grew to become smaller and cheaper in only a few years. NASA was —and finally used the units within the Mars Pathfinder Sojourner rover and the methods that allowed astronauts to maneuver about in house untethered. Boeing and different plane and avionics-system producers started adopting the units.

But the automotive business clearly represented the largest potential market. In the late Eighties, automobile firms had begun introducing fundamental traction-control methods of their high-end autos. These methods monitored steering-wheel place, throttle place, and particular person wheel speeds, and will regulate engine pace and braking once they detected an issue, akin to one wheel turning sooner than one other. They couldn’t, nevertheless, detect when the course of a automobile’s activate the street didn’t match the flip of the steering wheel, a key indicator of an unstable skid that would flip right into a rollover.

This quartz tuning fork responds to inertial forces and varieties the center of the GyroChip.
Peter Adams

The business was conscious this was a deficiency, and that rollover accidents had been a big explanation for deaths from auto accidents. Automotive-electronics suppliers like
Bosch had been working to develop small, dependable angular-rate sensors, largely out of silicon, to enhance traction management and rollover prevention, however none had been prepared for prime time.

Madni thought this was a market BEI might win. In partnership with
Continental Teves of Frankfurt, Germany, BEI got down to cut back the scale and value of the quartz units and manufacture them in portions unprecedented within the protection business, planning to ramp as much as hundreds of thousands yearly.

This main pivot—from protection to probably the most aggressive mass-market industries—would require massive adjustments for the corporate and for its engineers. Madni took the leap.

“I told the guys, ‘We are going to have to miniaturize it. We are going to have to bring the price down—from $1,200 to $1,800 per axis to $100, then to $50, and then to $25. We are going to have to sell it in hundreds of thousands of units a month and then a million and more a month.’”

To do all that, he knew that the design for a quartz-based charge sensor couldn’t have one further part, he says. And that the manufacturing, provide chain, and even gross sales administration needed to be modified dramatically.

“I told the engineers that we can’t have anything in there other than what is absolutely needed,” Madni remembers. “And some balked—too used to engaged on advanced designs, they weren’t considering doing a easy design. I attempted to clarify to them that what I used to be asking them to do was
extra troublesome than the advanced issues they’ve completed,” he says. But he nonetheless misplaced some high-level design engineers.

“The board of directors asked me what I was doing, [saying] that those were some of our best people. I told them that it wasn’t a question of the best people; if people are not going to adapt to the current needs, what good do they do?”

Peter Adams

Others had been prepared to adapt, and he despatched a few of these engineers to go to watch producers in Switzerland to study dealing with quartz; the watch business had been utilizing the fabric for many years. And he supplied others coaching by consultants within the automotive business, to study its operations and necessities.

The adjustments wanted weren’t simple, Madni remembers. “We have a lot of scars on our back. We went through a hell of a process. But during my tenure, BEI became the world’s largest supplier of sensors for automotive stability and rollover prevention.”

In the late Nineties, Madni says, the marketplace for digital stability-control methods exploded, because of an incident in 1997. An automotive journalist, testing a brand new Mercedes on a check monitor, was performing the so-called elchtest, sometimes called the “elk test”: He swerved at regular pace, meaning to simulate avoiding a moose crossing the street, and the automobile rolled over. Mercedes and rivals responded to the unhealthy publicity by embracing stability-control methods, and GyroChip demand skyrocketed.

Thanks to the take care of Continental Teves, BEI held a big piece of the automotive market for a few years. BEI wasn’t the one recreation on the town at that time—Germany’s Bosch
had begun producing silicon-based MEMS charge sensors in 1998—however the California firm was the one producer utilizing quartz sensors, which on the time carried out higher than silicon. Today, most producers of automotive-grade charge sensors use silicon, for that know-how has matured and such sensors are cheaper to provide.

While manufacturing for the auto market ramped up, Madni continued to search for different markets. He discovered one other massive one within the plane business.

The Boeing 737 within the early and mid-’90s had been concerned in a
sequence of crashes and incidents that stemmed from sudden rudder motion. Some of the failures had been traced to the plane’s energy management unit, which integrated yaw-damping know-how. While the yaw sensors weren’t particularly implicated, the corporate did want to revamp its PCUs. Madni and BEI satisfied Boeing to make use of BEI’s quartz sensors in all of its 737s going ahead, in addition to retrofitting current plane with the units. Manufacturers of plane for personal aviation quickly embraced the sensor as nicely. And finally the protection enterprise got here again.

Today, digital angular-rate sensors are in nearly each automobile—land, air, or sea. And Madni’s effort to miniaturize them and cut back their value blazed the path.

By 2005, BEI’s portfolio of applied sciences had made it a lovely goal for acquisition. Besides the speed sensors, it had earned approval for its growth of the unprecedentedly correct pointing system created for the
Hubble Space Telescope. The sensors and management group had expanded into BEI Sensors & Systems Co., of which Madni was CEO and CTO.

“We weren’t looking for a buyer; we were progressing extremely well and looking to still grow. But several people wanted to buy us, and one, Schneider Electric, was relentless. They wouldn’t give up, and we had to present the deal to the board.”

The sale went by in mid-2005 and, after a short transition interval and turning down a management place with
Schneider Electric, Madni formally retired in 2006.

While Madni says he’s been retired since 2006, he truly retired solely from business, crossing over right into a busy life in academia. He has served as an honorary professor at six universities, together with the Technical University of Crete, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and the University of Waikato, in New Zealand. In 2011, he joined the college of UCLA’s electrical and computer-engineering division as a distinguished scientist and distinguished adjunct professor and considers that his residence establishment. He is on campus weekly to satisfy along with his advisees, who’re working in sensing, sign processing, AI for sensor design, and ultrawideband high-speed instrumentation. Madni has suggested 25 graduate college students thus far.

One of his former UCLA college students, Cejo Ok. Lonappan, now principal methods engineer at
SILC Technologies, says Madni cares quite a bit concerning the impression of what his advisees are doing, asking them to write down an govt abstract of each analysis venture that goes past the know-how to speak concerning the larger image.

“Many times in academic research, it is easy to get lost in details, in minor things that seem impressive to the person doing the research,” Lonappan says. But Madni “cares a lot about the impact of what we are doing beyond the engineering and scientific community—the applications, the new frontiers it opens.”

S.Ok. Ramesh, a professor and former dean {of electrical} engineering and laptop science at
California State University, Northridge, has additionally seen Madni the advisor in motion.

“For him,” Ramesh says, “it’s not just about engineering. It’s about engineering the future, showing how to make a difference in people’s lives. And he’s not discouraged by challenges.”

“We had a group of students who wanted to take a headset used in gaming and use it to create a brain-control interface for wheelchair users,” Ramesh says. “We spoke to a neurologist, and he laughed at us, said you couldn’t do that, to monitor brain waves with a headset and instantaneously transfer that to a motion command. But Prof. Madni looked at it as how do we solve the problem, and even if we can’t solve it, along the way we will learn something by trying.”

Says Yannis Phillis, a professor on the
Technical University of Crete: “This man knows a lot about engineering, but he has a wide range of interests. When we met on Crete for the first time, for example, I danced a solo Zeibekiko; it has roots from ancient Greece. He asked me questions left and right about it, why this, why that. He is curious about society, about human behavior, about the environment—and, broadly speaking, the survival of our civilization.”

Madni went into engineering hoping to have an effect on humanity along with his work. He is glad that, in no less than some methods, he has completed so.

“The space applications have enhanced the understanding of our universe, and I was fortunate to play a part of that,” he says. “My contributions [to automotive safety] in their own humble way have been responsible for saving millions of lives around the world. And my technologies have played a role in the defense and security of our nation. It’s been the most gratifying career.”