Jess Isquith has been the president of PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), a consortium of more than 140 companies, since 2016. The group was originally formed to adapt PCI technology for use in high-performance telecommunications, military and industrial computing applications, but its work has grown to include newer technologies.

Jess provides and updates on the COM-HPC specification. The pinout and dimensions have been finalised for the COM-HPC Mini form factor and it is part of the 1.2 revision of the specification. Its pinout uses one connector instead of two (as is the case with COM-HPC Client and Server modules sizes A-E). The footprint is 50% smaller than the smallest COM-HPC Client (size A) modules and has 400 pins, which is more than COM Express Mini’s 220 pins. Extensions include up to four USB 4.0s including Thunderbolt and DisplayPort alternate modes, PCIe Gen 4/5 with up to 16 lanes and two 10GbE port. It is also qualified for bandwidths of more than 32Gbps to support PCIe Gen 5 or even Gen 6. There are other minor updates too, says Jess.

Smaller module

“The reduced module size of COM-HPC Mini parallels the industry trend of pushing more processing performance and networking to the edge,” she says. “Even with one less connector, COM-HPC Mini provides 400 lanes of PCIe Gen 4, PCIe Gen 5, and other connectivity, which is good enough for 90% [of] the capacity of the popular COM Express Type 6 specification.

“It’s going to enable mid-range intelligence in everything from autonomous vehicles to edge analytics and AI servers to robotics platforms and more for the next decade or two.

“The entire 1.2 revision, from SoW to ratification, will have taken just over a year once complete, which is very rare in the world of open standards,” she continues.

Jess came to the PICMG through working with companies that were members as clients in the technical marketing agency she set up after a career in engineering and network design. “I worked with companies that had been PICMG members that said there were some things I could really help out with at PICMG. So, I officially came on board as the marketing officer, working on various projects.”

In 2016, PICMG’s president, Joe Pavlat, died and “kind of by default” Jess took his place until an election could take place.

“The expectation was that it would just be for the remainder of 2016… During that time, I started digging a bit deeper into PICMG and realised there were signs of an amazing organisation based on what had been produced since 1994, but organisationally it needed a lot of improvement. From an organisational perspective it was very much engineers for engineers and not as much was put into the leadership of PICMG. So I started getting hungry to do some of that. Later, we had an election, and I was pleasantly surprised to win,” she recalls.

Early interests

At school Jess excelled in maths and physics and – until a conversation with a cousin – wanted to be a civil engineer. Members of her father’s family were in engineering, working on large projects in New York and New Jersey. A conversation with ‘cousin Bobby’ upset her: “[He] said something like, ‘Well, you realise you’d have to go on sites and wear a hard hat and work boots.’ That was the first time I experienced ‘You realise you’re a girl, right?’”

Undeterred, and armed with the right grades, she attended Tufts University (Massachusetts), which “had the highest percentage of female engineers in the country at the time. And that was a selling point to me.”

In the first year she studied mixed computer science and industrial design and started to enjoy coding. She found the ergonomics programme (which is now human factors engineering or UX design). “This was the early stages of graphical interfaces and how you design equipment for humans. That became my passion,” she says.

Her first post-graduate job was at Chiron designing blood gas analysers, putting the first GUIs into medical devices. A mentor sponsored her for an engineering entrepreneurship graduate programme, working with the company to develop a product to a certain level to achieve a Master’s degree.

Her project was sharing quality control data from medical devices, one of the first times the internet was used to share medical data. “Prior to that hospitals would run different QC tests, fill out forms, scan and fax the forms to send them in, and so on. I was able to have a team put this thing together.”

The project followed studies and beta programs at local universities, but was halted because it was not seen as viable. “They explained to me they don’t see the internet as a viable, reliable option for this type of communication and critical data that could impact patients. It was stopped in its tracks and I was completely confused,” she says.

“That was the event that made me want to understand product marketing, technical marketing, IP issues, etc. I believe there’s innovation, there’s reality, and there’s bridging existing technology with something that’s feasible. And then there’s a big, public company. I wanted to be on that side of the conversation.” Philosophically, she reflects that devastating as this decision was, it taught her a lot.

Her next position was at Aurora Technologies, developing multi-port serial controllers, out-of-band network control and PCI expansion systems. “Within a few years I was in charge of the company, and what followed was three acquisitions over about eight years,” she says.

Her next career move was to start a technical marketing agency, which led to PICMG.

PICMG presidency

PICMG is a small not for profit consortium with limited resources but hundreds of members, says Jess. Her role includes a lot of organisational activities and the provision of day-to-day services for members.

“I like the process. I like seeing something from a statement of work through a specification and then manifested into a product. I’ve been part of PICMG long enough that I’ve been able to see that whole process, with COM-HPC as a great example – from initial conversations with the group determining what organisation they want to bring that initiative through, the selection of PICMG, and then all of a sudden over 20 companies coming together to collaborate with the three or four companies that did the statement of work,” Jess says.

“To bring a specification to the market involves thousands of hours to develop hundreds of pages of documentation, she says, as well as the voting processes, seeing companies with products selling it, and tens upon tens of other companies that were not involved at all wanting the specification who are not even PICMG members.”
Her aim is for PICMG to be viewed with the respect it deserves, which means having the best companies working together to create work product, solving problems and bringing standards into embedded computing. It’s a clear, simple mission,” she explains.

Advice to the next generation

When asked about the advice she would give to young women considering a degree in electronics engineering today, Jess points out that she left the industry 10 years ago, when she was hopeful that things for young women in the industry were getting better. Now, though, she says she leads an organisation that is +95% male. “I can think of very few females in a leadership position within the PICMG technical sub-committees,” she concedes.

“The flip side of that is when you look at statistics for males/females entering engineering school, it’s become a lot more even. Not necessarily in electronics engineering, but areas like chemical engineering, software and biomedical have become less gender biased for females. I’d like to think that young women are being less turned away by the industry and many STEAM [science, technology, electronics, arts and maths] programmes are addressing systemic biases,” she says.

“I’ve spent my entire career as one of the only females in any room at any time. And I feel that for the most part, in my current role, I’m not disrespected, but I wish the changes were more overt than they have been,” she adds.

She would encourage any young woman considering a career in engineering to pursue it and not let the occasional comment or situation discourage them.

She believes that for the most part, when people become your peers, they are respectful. Outliers exist in every environment, she reasons “And there’s nothing wrong with being viewed as a big fish in a small sea, even for doing the same as your peers. So embrace that, help others.

“It’s insane that in 2023 you have to have this conversation, but it’s an evolving conversation that’s going [to] happen in a different way in 2050, but [it will] still be an evolving conversation,” she predicts.