It is a pleasure to recommend Steve Flannagan as a consultant/contractor for your technical problem solving team. I have known Steve since he joined Motorola in 1983. Steve’s leadership and technical abilities were a major reason that Motorola was able to become the foremost company in Fast Static RAMs. Steve was able to attract top quality talent to our group, guide the career development of the many people reporting to him, and able to form a cohesive, productive team structure. At a time of significant employee expansion, Steve initiated a dialog with the staffing department leading to a good understanding on the part of the staffing team of the specific skills potential memory designers should possess. As a result, recruiting efficiency improved and the strongest group of new graduates I have had the pleasure of working with joined the department over a several year span.

Steve’s own grasp of circuit design fundamentals, especially with regard to memory design, is the best of anyone I know. The leadership SRAM products for which Motorola was known in the 1980s and 1990s came either from Steve’s team directly, or were derived from one of their designs. Steve also has a master’s grasp of the design process, and a good understanding of component contribution to system behavior and performance. These strengths enable him to contribute from high levels, such as, setting useful target specifications for a new design, down to identifying the root cause of problems in a debug situation – be they design, layout, or process issues. These strengths have led to many patents and publications by Steve advancing public knowledge of memory design in particular, as well as improved understanding of more general topics, such as, arbitration principals. Also, he published for internal consumption tutorials of design steps for key circuit components, such as, input buffers and sense-amplifiers.

In the years Steve and I worked together in the same department he took a keen interest in assuring the members of his team understood fundamental design concepts. He worked with them individually, as needed, and as a team. He paid particular attention to instituting methods and processes to achieve success. At the same time he made sure the underlying principals were understood, so that team members’ knowledge went beyond simply knowing cookbook steps needed to run a particular tool in a certain way.

Steve is a true leader and would be a valuable asset to your organization.

If you have any questions please contact me.

Sincerely,

Bill Martino
MRAM Design Manager
Freescale Semiconductor
March 26, 2006

Steve was named a Dan Noble Fellow by the CEO during his tenure at Motorola, which is the highest honor any engineer could garner in the company. His photo is in the Motorola annual report for that year, if memory serves. Steve's patent contributions also speak volumes about the level of innovation he can bring to a company.

Working directly for him as a junior designer at the time, I've to this day never seen someone who can start with a blank piece of paper, throw down transistor level designs, and think out loud "seeing" current and voltage as he does. It was quite a wonder to see.

Steve's reputation as an extremely intelligent and thorough technical leader was widely held, and designs he led were known for being high performance and robust. His architecture judgement was uncanny. He has a great ability to see trends, and apply past experiences prudently to constantly-changing, state-of-the-art fabrication processes. In the full-custom SRAM designs he was tasked with, the projects were nearly all with the latest and finest-pitch lithography available at the time, designing circuits and architectures for fab processes that were themselves still in flux. His breadth and depth of technical experience seemed to guide his intuition with great aplomb.

While there were design leaders whose work caused management to hold their breath when first samples came back from the fab, Steve was definitely NOT one of them. Technical confidence was always high in designs Steve led.

Todd Haverkos
Internet Posting
August 27, 2009