An engineer got his white paper unstuck by figuring out the story

Do you ever get stuck writing in an unfamiliar format? Drop the template for a while and concentrate on saying something interesting.

E.C. had a marketing white paper to write. Of course, an expert semiconductor engineer like him should have some interesting things to say about the company’s products. And so his boss had set this white paper as an objective.

He read some other white papers to get an idea of the genre. They looked great. Polished words and elegant layouts told how other people were doing wonderful things.

How would he start his own paper? He tried to follow the format and language of the other examples he’d seen. All that came to mind was clichéd phrases. Nothing that fit together or filled more than half a page. He was stuck.

I, as the communications coach, was asked to help. How was I supposed to do that? I knew little about semiconductors. The closest I’d got to chip design was choosing ketchup or salt & vinegar.

But if one trait has helped my career more than anything else, it’s being curious about stuff. “What’s the current project?” I asked.

The project was to make chips for security cameras, for example in buildings or parking lots. These cameras have a challenge. They need to show you what’s going on across a scene that could be partly dark, partly light. And the lighting could change instantly, for example if the sunlight is going in and out of clouds.

Cameras don’t do very well with such varied scenes. Either detail is lost in shadows, or burned out in overexposed areas. Now, what even phone cameras do is cleverly blend a number of shots taken at different exposures. They increase “local contrast”. That is, they make sure that the details in each area are clear, even if the overall picture isn’t entirely true to life.

If you have an iPhone and take a picture of a high-contrast scene, you’ll notice it takes maybe half a second to process. Back when I worked with E.C., phones didn’t do that yet. Software was way too slow. (Photographers would carefully line up multiple shots in Photoshop to get the same effect.)

Now imagine trying to do all that software processing, on security-camera video, at many frames per second, over a decade ago. Impossible!

How did E.C. unblock his writing? (And how did his company get round the tech limitations?)

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