By Michael Watkins

Innovative thinking - Rockwell Collins Principal Engineering Manager David Baugh realized his love and talent for engineering in the fifth grade. Today, the California native is the recipient of the Rockwell Collins Open Innovator award for the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2007.
Photo by Paul Marlow, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

As a youth leader at his church and manager of more than 25 high school and college interns each year, David Baugh knows sometimes it just takes one teacher or mentor to turn the light on in a young mind.

For Baugh, that one person was his algebra through pre-calculus teacher, who showed him math could be fun as well as practical - a mantra by which Baugh continues to work and teach.

"He really helped me see that math is useful in our lives, and it's fun and exciting; he made me want to learn more and apply it," said Baugh, a principal engineering manager for Software Communication Architectures in Cedar Rapids. "There's always one teacher - someone who motivates you and makes you want to learn more. I try to get the kids I work with more excited about engineering at a young age."

Baugh uses this love and natural gift for problem solving to think innovatively on behalf of Rockwell Collins every day. His vision and work - culminating in 18 months of meetings and strategizing with an outside firm to develop new technological opportunities and products - garnered him the Rockwell Collins Open Innovator Award for the fourth quarter of FY'07.

He was nominated for the award by Floyd Van Auken, director of Advanced Communication Technology, for his work with Adapt4 in the innovative development of cognitive radio capabilities into military software-defined radio opportunities.

"In the past couple of years, I have been mentoring my department to spend time thinking more about 'open innovation' and how we can acquire external sources of technologies and create a potentially new innovative Rockwell Collins product," said Van Auken, who has directed Baugh and his team since 2002.

"David had the foresight to evaluate Adapt4's cognitive radio concepts of automatically harvesting unused frequency channels and aggregating these unused channels into a larger single bandwidth channel," Van Auken continued. "This benefits the military users with real-time spectrum management, maximizes their throughput and quality of service and reduces their need for prior mission planning."

Despite having twice been recognized as a department winner for the Rockwell Collins Engineer of the Year award, Baugh is particularly humbled by the Open Innovator award because of what it represents for the future technological advancements for our company.

"It's truly an honor to win this award because Rockwell Collins is such a good company that rewards people for their performance and contributions," said Baugh, a California native who joined our company in 1982. "I've been able to work with some smart, amazing people over the years. This award really is the summary of all that I've learned from them."

Merging Technologies

In early 2007, the Rockwell Collins and Adapt4 collaboration was funded to develop and demonstrate cognitive radio capabilities in military legacy products, specifically the ARC-210 and Talon radios.

The successful demonstration proved that capitalizing on unused bandwidth and welding channels together allowed the ARC-210 Talon radio (with its 25 kHz channel spacing) transmission data rates to exceed 100 kbps.

This essentially lays the foundation for future "smart" radios that automatically and quickly seek out open channels - saving valuable time and ultimately lives during combat.

According to Brian Hulet, a principal systems engineer who worked with Baugh on the Adapt4 collaboration, recognizing the long-term importance of cognitive radio technology and how it plays into future business opportunities for our company is one of Baugh's strengths.

"Dave has positioned his department for successful pursuit of future opportunities," Hulet said. "He has placed high importance on fostering a good working relationship with Adapt4, and demonstrated the urgency needed when dealing with a small start-up company to ensure mutual success."

Baugh's work history in both digital software and hardware design and computer science made the product collaboration with Adapt4 seamless and visionary.

"Because of the work by David and his team's work, Rockwell Collins and Adapt4 are postured to be technology leaders for both the commercial and military cognitive radio market segments," said Van Auken, who will retire Feb. 15 after 30 years at our company. "To date, there are no military cognitive radios in the marketplace, and while a disruptive technology, ultimately it will be the next generation of software-defined radios."

It's with this concept in mind that Baugh - who realized his own love and talent for engineering in the fifth grade, even before he really understood what it was - works to create new business opportunities and relationships for his department and the company.

"Look at what a tremendous success the iPod has proven to be for Apple. That technology wasn't all theirs," said Baugh, who received degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Irvine. "They took technology that already existed and added three or four innovations to it, and it's made them billions of dollars.

"Being innovative has to be something you think about every day - taking technology and moving forward," added Baugh, who has watched his oldest daughter, Elizabeth, follow in his engineering footsteps at Iowa State University. "You can't exist and succeed doing it all yourself."

- Michael Watkins is a freelance writer.