September 2026 Newsletter - Corporate Member Spotlight

September 2026

Corporate Member Spotlight

 

Q. Can you share the role your organization plays in advancing the ECE industry?

RIGOL makes electronic test and measurement tools that engineers use to build, test, troubleshoot, and ultimately turn their ideas into working products.  We cover the range of standard bench equipment, from basic instruments like power supplies multi-meters and function generators  to more advanced instruments like oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, signal generators and vector network analyzers.

 

What excites me personally is helping bring capabilities that were once limited to big-budget labs into the hands of a much broader group of engineers and students

 

Technologies that historically lived mostly in very expensive instruments, such as real-time spectrum analysis, high-bandwidth oscilloscopes, advanced VNAs, jitter and signal-integrity tools, are becoming available to smaller companies, universities, and individual engineers.

 

I think that matters. Innovation tends to accelerate when good tools stop being scarce resources.

 

 

Q. From your perspective, what does a strong industry–academia partnership look like, and how is your organization working to support or strengthen that relationship?

The strongest industry–academia partnerships are a real two-way exchange, not just equipment donations or sponsorships.

 

Industry can give educators better visibility into where technology is headed, the problems engineers are actually running into, and the skills that are becoming more important. Universities, in turn, are often exploring ideas years before there is a real commercial market for them.

 

For us, the goal isn’t just to put modern instruments in a lab. We want to help faculty give students more opportunities to build, measure, troubleshoot, and solve real engineering problems through labs, research, senior projects, and better access to test equipment.

 

We also want to listen. What are students working on? Where are the limitations in the lab? What new technologies are starting to show up in research?  What measurements would faculty like to teach but can’t today? Those conversations should shape both how we support universities and, over time, the products we build.

 

To me, that’s what makes it a partnership rather than just a vendor relationship.

 

Q. What are the most significant shifts you are seeing in the ECE landscape, and how are they influencing the skills you look for in graduates?

One of the biggest shifts I see is that the boundaries between engineering disciplines are disappearing.

 

An engineer working on an EV may need to understand power electronics, embedded software, communications, EMI, and high-speed digital behavior. Someone working on a wireless product may spend almost as much time on power integrity and digital buses as they do on RF. That makes systems thinking much more important.

 

The other big shift is the increasing reliance on sophisticated tools and automation. Engineers have incredibly powerful simulation, automation, and now AI tools. That’s a huge advantage, but it also creates a risk that people become very good at using the tools without really understanding what’s happening underneath them.

 

From a test and measurement perspective, you see that pretty quickly. A scope can calculate rise time, a VNA can generate an S-parameter plot, and AI can help interpret the result. But you still have to understand the measurement and know when things do and don't make sense.

 

That’s why I think curiosity, strong fundamentals, and engineering judgment are becoming more important, not less.

 

Q. Where do you see the biggest gaps between how students are currently being prepared and what industry needs today, both technically and professionally?

Technically, I think the biggest gap is often between knowing the theory and being comfortable when the real world doesn’t behave like the theory.  Real signals have noise. Probes load circuits. Cables have loss. Ground leads have inductance. Digital signals stop behaving like digital signals at fast enough edge rates. RF energy ends up in places you didn’t expect it to. That messiness is where engineering gets interesting.  Students who have spent a lot of time actually building and measuring things tend to develop a kind of engineering intuition that is hard to teach from a textbook.

 

Professionally, I think communication is probably the biggest gap. In industry, understanding the technology is only part of the job. Engineers need to be able to explain why a problem matters, communicate uncertainty, defend a recommendation, and translate complex technical issues for people outside their own discipline. The engineers who can combine technical depth with the ability to make that technology understandable and actionable tend to have an outsized impact.

 

Q. How can ECE programs better integrate real-world, hands-on experiences to prepare students for industry roles?

Give students more opportunities to build, measure, break, troubleshoot, and improve things.

 

Labs are most valuable when students aren’t just following ten predefined steps to get an expected result. Give them a design objective, some constraints, access to modern instrumentation, and enough freedom to figure out how to get there. That means building something, measuring it, having it not work the way they expected, figuring out why, and trying again.

 

Most of us who went through an electrical engineering program probably have a story about blowing up a capacitor, smoking a component, or catching something on fire in the lab. Those experiences stick with you because that’s often when the learning becomes real.

 

Industry can help by bringing more of the real world into the classroom: actual design challenges, equipment, guest engineers, capstone projects, internships, and examples based on problems companies are really trying to solve. The closer students can get to the iterative, sometimes messy way engineering actually happens, the better prepared they’ll be when they enter the workforce.

 

Q. What advice would you give to ECE students as they adapt to rapid technological change, particularly in areas like AI?

Use AI aggressively, but don’t outsource your understanding to it.

 

AI is going to become a normal engineering tool, just like SPICE, MATLAB, a compiler, or an oscilloscope. Engineers who learn how to use it well are going to be dramatically more productive.

 

But there’s a big difference between getting an answer and knowing whether the answer is right. That’s where fundamentals still matter. Understand circuits, signals, electromagnetics, noise, probability, and how to make a good measurement. Those are the things that let you ask better questions, challenge an answer, and recognize when something doesn’t make sense.

 

I’d also encourage students not to get too narrowly defined by a single technology or specialty. The tools are going to change, and some of the things you learn today may look very different ten years from now. The engineers who do well over the long term are usually the ones who stay curious and keep teaching themselves new things.

 

In some ways, I think strong fundamentals become even more valuable in an AI-heavy world. Generating an answer will get easier. Knowing which answers to trust, and what to do with them, will be the harder skill.

 

Q. Looking ahead, what opportunities excite you most about the future of ECE?

I don’t think there has ever been a more interesting time to enter electrical and computer engineering.

 

AI infrastructure, semiconductors, autonomous systems, wireless communications, robotics, electrification, quantum technologies, and advanced computing are all creating hard engineering problems. What excites me is that, for all the attention on software and AI, so much of this still comes back to the physical world.

 

Someone still has to design the hardware, understand the signals, deal with noise and interference, and figure out why something that worked in simulation isn’t working on the bench.

 

From a test and measurement perspective, that’s exciting because all of those systems are getting harder to characterize. Signals are faster, RF systems are higher frequency wider-band, and the line between digital and RF keeps getting blurrier. As systems get more complex, being able to measure what is actually happening becomes even more important.

 

The other opportunity I find exciting is accessibility. Capabilities that once required a laboratory with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment are steadily becoming more available to universities, startups, and individual engineers. 

 

When you combine better instruments, inexpensive computing, open-source tools, and AI, a small group of talented engineers can do things that would have required a much larger organization not very long ago.  I think we’re going to see a lot of interesting innovation come from that.