Kent H. Lundberg, Ph.D

President
Keeling Flight Hardware, Ltd.
PO Box 281
Weston, MA 02493

Visiting Professor of Engineering
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

Associate Editor for History
IEEE Control Systems Magazine

Occasional Lecturer
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research

My primary research interests are in classical feedback control systems and analog circuit design. I am currently working on educational items (applets, web labs, lecture demos, student DIY kits, books, course notes, and the Control Systems Concept Inventory) for feedback systems and classical control engineering.

History

Analog and hybrid computing have left an indelible mark on electrical engineering, and I am interested in this technological legacy. I have recently editted a special issue of IEEE Control Systems Magazine on the history of analog computing (the June 2005 issue), and I am working on a virtual reconstruction of Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer. I am also interested in the history of analog-circuit-design techniques (such as "What is the earliest reference to a cascode topology using transistors?").

Publications

My publications, presentations, invited talks, and unpublished materials are summarized on my publications page.

Teaching

Advanced Circuit Techniques (6.331). Sample-and-hold circuits, digital-to-analog converters, analog-to-digital converters, high-speed amplifiers, power conversion, and phase lock loops.

Solid State Circuits (6.301). Transistor circuits from the common emitter amplifier to op amps, multipliers, references, and high speed logic. Open-circuit time constants, translinear principle, charge control model.

Feedback Systems (6.302). Root locus, Nyquist, Hall, Nichols, and Bode. Compensation techniques. Internal and external compensation of operational amplifiers. Servomechanisms, power coverters, and thermal systems.

My students hate me.

Consulting and Seminars

Design, research, and teaching. Inquire within.

I teach industry seminars on Analog Circuits, Feedback Control Systems, Advanced Circuit Design, and CMOS Analog Circuit Design.

Books!

Reading is fundamental. Reading the fundamental literature is even more so.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
--- Mark Twain

I collect old textbooks, especially

• Control Engineering books from the 1940s and 1950s
  See Bennett, "A Brief History of Automatic Control" IEEE Control Systems, June 1996.
• The MIT Lincoln Laboratory Publications Series (McGraw-Hill)
• The Bell Telephone Laboratory Series (Van Nostrand)
• The McGraw-Hill Electrical and Electronic Engineering Series

I have complete collections of

• The MIT Principles of Electrical Engineering Series 1943-1949 (Wiley)
• The MIT Radiation Laboratory Series 1947-1953 (McGraw-Hill)
• The National Nuclear Energy Series 1948-1956 (McGraw-Hill)
• The M.I.T. "Core Curriculum" in Electrical Engineering Series (Wiley) 1953-1960 (shown at right).
• The McGraw-Hill Series on Control Systems Engineering 1956-1963
• The MIT Semiconductor Electronics Education Committee Series 1964-1966 (Wiley)

Advanced Book Exchange is a good search engine for used books.

History of Control Systems

I am a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society History Committee.

I have scanned John Miller's paper "Dependence of the input impedance of a three-electrode vacuum tube upon the load in the plate circuit." This paper is the first description of the Miller Effect.

Does anyone have a copy of A. J. Grant's root-locus paper?

Is there a better disproof of the Barkhausen Stability Criterion?

I am also a member of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Control Education.

Home Movies

Not really.

1. A simple demonstration of Cauchy's Residue Theorem.
2. Drawing a Nyquist diagram for L(s)=1/(s+1)³ with standard D-contour.
3. Drawing a Nyquist diagram for L(s)=(s+1)/(s²+1) with notched D-contour.
4. Drawing a Nyquist diagram from measured frequency-response data.
5. Transformation of Nichols plot to closed-loop Bode plot for L(s)=1/s(s+1).
6. Transformation of Nichols plot to closed-loop Bode plot for L(s)=10/s(s+1).

Animations 1, 2, 3, and 4 produced with Matlab and ImageMagick. Animations 5 and 6 produced with Matlab, the Visualizaion Toolkit, and Zach Malchano.

Pedantry

The year is not 2k4.

TeX is better than Word.

Your browser is broken.

Crosses never connect, connections never cross.

Personal Interests

Member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

Builder of analog music and video synthesizers (I also encourage students to build analog synthesizer modules for analog lab projects).

Architect of Car Crash Chili (you don't "cook" a chili, you "build" it).

Other Links

I've written a lot of stupid web pages:

• Nobody is sharing experiences about you
• Nobody is investigating your background
• I listen to the music and noise of Edvard Graham Lewis.
• I found a solution to the Wintel Numeric Keypad and Tab Problem
• I wrote a version of the game "robots" for OS/2 and have GPL'ed the source
• My Colourbox samples list (text file)
• What's on my iPod? Free Music!

Vanity

Other pages and links about me:

• Automatically generated summary at Zoominfo
• Leave anonymous feedback at Rate My Professors
• MobyGames "developer" rap sheet
• Place-holding web pages here, here, and there