Balancing research and entrepreneurship (full length interview)
Meghna Madhusudan will be earning her doctoral degree under the guidance of Professor Ramesh Harjani at the end of spring 2025. Her research, which straddles the areas of circuit design and computer-aided design (CAD), has thrown at her its own unique challenges and opportunities. She spoke to us recently about the complexities of working in a highly specialized area, and how she has balanced her entrepreneurial interest while working on her dissertation. She addresses the highs and lows of her time as a graduate student and shares how students can prepare for a demanding program and come through it successfully.
Start in the graduate program:
I started in the graduate program in fall 2017 under the supervision of Professor Ramesh Harjani. I was always keen on analog design, so I decided to pursue research in the area, but that decision surprised my family and friends. They felt that with everything going digital, my pursuit of research in analog circuits was a terrible idea. But I went ahead with my decision and took courses with Professor Harjani. It wasn’t smooth sailing. I have always struggled with self-doubt. I tend to question myself and overthink every step even with things I am pretty good at. Despite the overthinking I still got things wrong. So it was hard, but I continued to persevere and made the most of Professor Harjani’s office hours.
On ALIGN, and honing non-academic skills:
At the end of my first semester I joined the ALIGN research team*. ALIGN is an open source layout generator supported by a DARPA IDEA grant that Professors Harjani and Sachin Sapatnekar had received for the design and development of analog circuits. Members of the ALIGN team came from Professor Harjani’s research group with analog design skills and from Professor Sapatnekar’s research group with CAD skills. But we did not have anyone who could write software for analog design as it is a pretty niche skill. Not many people do both even in the industry. I had written software as an undergraduate intern. Although I was not very interested in writing code at that time, the idea of writing code for analog design appealed to me. So I ended up being the analog design guide bridging the gap. I was only in my second semester at the time and the learning curve was steep. But it was a lot of fun to work with the ALIGN team. We worked hard together and challenged each other. It was a very collaborative environment and my time on the team made me realize how much I like working in a team.
Working on the ALIGN team meant that I had to also attend and present at DARPA integration meetings where teams working on DARPA funded projects showcase their work. Our professors trusted us to present at these meetings. This was a big deal for me because growing up I had terrible stage fright. Although I had a better handle on it as an undergraduate student, presenting at a DARPA meeting in front of teams from across the country was a new challenge. We practiced a lot as a team before each of these meetings and we got really good at it. All that practice helped me a lot, and I became more confident. A couple of other things also helped me. Firstly, these were technical presentations which I really enjoyed, so talking about the content was easier. Secondly, our professors gave us feedback that was very helpful.
On the challenges of publishing:
Getting papers published is critical for a Ph.D. student. My work lives in a niche area straddling analog design and CAD, which puts me in a difficult position. Where do I publish? Do I try to publish in analog conferences, papers, and journals, or CAD conferences, papers, and journals? My idea for my first paper lived at the intersection of the two areas: it was an analog design perspective to automation. It was a CAD paper with strong ties to analog design. I wanted to contribute and add value in my own way, in a way that other people could not do. The idea was compelling but very new and out there, which made me doubt my work. I began questioning my place in the doctoral program. So yes, the old self-doubt raised its head again. Eventually I did publish the paper; I submitted it in 2020 and it was published in 2021. This experience made me stronger. It was my first published paper as a first author. First author papers are important for thesis completion in the doctoral program and this paper was important to me academically and personally.
On entrepreneurial interests:
Even as an undergraduate student, I was interested in starting a hard technology company. So sometime between my second and third years as a Ph.D. student, I decided to explore what it would take to be an entrepreneur. My idea was to commercialize ALIGN. I started with the MIN-Corps program at the University of Minnesota where I learned about customer discovery. My first step was to learn whether people needed what I was proposing. This involved simply talking to our potential customers and learning what they did everyday at work, what their pain points were, and how they operated. I had a travel grant so I could visit major conferences and talk to attendees and understand their needs. I visited the Design Automation Conference, a premier CAD conference. It was hard initially. How do you walk up to strangers and start talking? Sometimes they were not welcoming because they were in some sense in their own world. And I would stand there in a corner wondering how to break into a group of people who were talking to each other.
On the first day I barely spoke to anyone. I was overthinking my approach, the negative responses I got, and so on. But eventually I learned to let that go, be objective about the responses, find areas to improve, and keep moving on. The workshop also taught me not to be so emotionally attached to my work, to ALIGN, and the work we did on it collectively. The focus is not on fitting what we had into someone’s workday, but trying to figure out what they need and adapt what you have to their needs. And if you have to go back and build up from scratch, that’s okay.
After successfully finishing the MIN-Corps program the next step was to gain acceptance to the NSF I-Corps program. Although similar to MIN-Corps, it is more rigorous. You have to interview over a hundred people. You are given $50,000 and you can have a team of three to work with you on the project. One of them is the entrepreneurial lead (which was me), another is the technical lead (S. Ramprasath who was a postdoctoral associate on Professor Sapatnekar’s team signed up), and the third person has to be an industry mentor, someone with no connection or commitment to the technology we are working on. They should also be able to dedicate 10 to 15 hours a week to the project. It took us several months to find a suitable industry mentor, but ultimately Brian Blow, Professor Harjani’s very first master’s student who had recently retired from Medtronic, agreed to join us.
We had to meet and interview roughly 15 people each week to meet our target of 100 interviews. This time around I was more confident having gone through a version of the tasks and expectations in the MIN- CORPS round. Ramprasath and Brian’s industry connections helped us get started with interviews quickly. We also attended the ISSCC, a premier conference for analog design, spoke to many more people and also asked our initial interviewees if they could connect us to other interested individuals. Talking to contacts of contacts was how we met our target of 100.
We had weekly calls with our NSF advisors and presented what we covered in our interviews, the questions we asked, and what we learned from those conversations. The advisors also coached us on questions to ask, and guided us on analyzing the responses we got. It was an involved process, but it was a lot of fun, and I am very glad we did it.
On balancing the entrepreneurial interest with doctoral research:
Professor Harjani and Professor Sapatnekar were very supportive of my entrepreneurial interests. They gave me the freedom and flexibility to explore these opportunities. I am grateful for that because I have always wanted to try my hand at entrepreneurship, and it was a key reason for applying to the Ph.D. program. I knew it would be challenging in terms of the demands on my time, as well as the emotional rollercoaster it would be, but I knew that I had to do it or I would be left with a feeling of unfinished business.
The NSF I-Corps program was a lot of fun, but there were quite a few lows too. Towards the end of the program what I learned was that we had a market, we had customers, but with our software not being patented, it was harder to differentiate it from our competitors who were big players such as Cadence and Synopsys. So I decided to give it a rest for a while, look for employment as I prepared to graduate, and come back to this idea after a few years in the industry.
On career prospects:
My job and internship search time was yet another significant challenge. It was very difficult for me to get a position that called for my niche expertise. Most conversations with recruiters would end with me realizing that they needed someone who was either a CAD expert or an analog expert. Ultimately, it was through my NSF I-Corps program that I was introduced to the team I work with now at Analog Devices. I started with an internship at the company that eventually turned into a full time position for me. My job is a perfect fit with my Ph.D. research. I don’t think I would get a job like this anywhere else in any other company. The stars had to align for this sort of thing to happen. I think talking to those 100 people as I worked through the NSF program opened up avenues for me that ultimately led me to where I am today.
On doing mentorship right:
I struggled a lot with comparisons. It comes from many places: sometimes I compare myself with others. At other times, people I know have compared me with others. It often starts off as something harmless where they might say, “Okay, look at this other student,” who might also be a female graduate student. The intent is to inspire you, but somewhere along the way it turns into a comparison where I am left with the feeling that I am not as good as the other student. I don’t see that happen much with male students. They are allowed to have their own identities, strengths, and weaknesses, and they are treated as individuals. I wish I was told, “Here are your strengths, and these are your weaknesses.”
It is also important to coach students to pass it forward. Otherwise a person who has undergone a lot of hardship with no one to really look out for them might not feel like helping others. From their perspective, they have always had to look out for themselves with no one helping them.
On the road ahead:
I think something that all students should remember is that the journey does not end with graduation. It continues and there are challenges and some things work out and some don’t. But the important thing is to keep going. Over the course of the years I have seen that people who are better able to handle setbacks and failures are the ones who keep moving forward. Doubting yourself doesn’t help. That was something that held me back a lot during my early years in the program. So now when I experience a setback and I start to dwell on it, I remind myself that I have thought through all the gloomy scenarios. I have gone through so much of it already that now I can handle the emotional ups and downs of a setback better. The stress is still there, but now I am better at managing it.
The doctoral program for me was a path to self-discovery. I wanted to find myself. And it has made me a lot stronger and more capable of handling my emotions and reactions whatever they are, positive or negative.
Message to students starting in the graduate program:
It is important to know yourself. Even when you are looking for a job, know yourself well and understand what kind of environment you will work well in. Choose people and teams who will support and encourage you. Of course it can be difficult to judge some of that when you are on the outside.
Identify what it is you like or want. You might go with the flow and do what your friends are doing, or do what will make you the most money. But the relationships you build with people are equally if not more important.
On the outside looking in, you don’t see all the struggles that students are going through. It would be helpful to know that other people go through it too. And if I can be that person for someone else that would be great. I would like to let them know that whatever they are doing is good and setbacks are natural. And these things will always happen. It’s not like one day, suddenly, things will be perfect. But you will learn to accept them and work with them and keep pressing forward.
* ALIGN (Analog Layout, Intelligently Generated from Netlists) is an open source automatic layout generator for analog circuits. Developed under the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) IDEA (Intelligent Design of Electronic Assets) program, it is a collaborative endeavor undertaken by the University of Minnesota, Texas A&M University, and Intel Corporation.
Professor Ramesh Harjani's expertise lies in analog/RF circuits for wireless and wired communications, analog signal processing, and integrated power electronics. He hold the Edgar F. Johnson Professorship in Electronic Communications.
Professor Sachin Sapatnekar's expertise lies in computer-aided design of VLSI circuits and systems. He is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and holds the Robert and Marjorie Henle Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering.