Benjamin L. Blanton Email & Phone Number

Greater Seattle Area

Arlington, Va

Led development of commercial and industrial video, control, and monitoring systems, from requirements through PCB layout, board bring-up, and customer delivery.• Program lead and primary customer contact for smart LED street lighting systems.• Led development of cellular controlled LED street light system using Verizon’s Internet of Things (IoT) LTE M1 band modem.• Designed and built a highly integrated ARM video processing board with both LTE and WIFI to allow for video monitoring within a smart LED street lighting system.• Led design of an industrial tablet designed for harsh EMI/EMC environments, consisting of a NXP ARM processor, analog video processing, gigabit Ethernet, LVDS, HDMI and DDR3 memory.• Facilitated UL, CE, FCC, and IEC regulatory testing for both commercial and industrial products.• Worked with contract manufacturers to perform failure analysis and design updates, significantly improving product yield.• Conducted hardware trade studies internally and for company partners leveraging reference designs to both test and validate hardware specifications.• Primary technical contact with vendors for hardware build and reliability issues, including IC, cable, and contract manufacturers.

Dulles, Va

Led team of engineers and technicians developing handheld and vehicle based ground penetrating radar detecting solutions.• Lead Hardware Engineer on IR&D program developing a portable detection system, reducing size, weight, and power. Helped bring the program from IR&D to $1.4 million production contract in less than four months.• Led design of PCBs from requirements to schematic capture, layout, board bring-up, and production support.• Supported production, field engineers, and business development, developing hardware and software upgrades to enhance system durability and reliability.• Primary technical contact with vendors for hardware design and reliability issues, including cable, PCB, and IC manufacturers. • Directed selection and integration of new hardware across product lines.• Collaborated with international teams and partners, leading efforts to design and debug software and hardware as well as plan and lead data collections.

Manassas, Va

Led team of engineers in developing and executing multi-platform submarine systems and equipment. Developed complex systems using both Xilinx and Altera gate arrays from requirements documentation, design and implementation, simulation, and board-level validation testing. Designed for digital signal processing, video compression, control, and RF communication systems.• Collaborated with sonar processing experts to create an FPGA-based digital signal processing string, providing real time high-speed acoustic data demodulation.• Led team of engineers in developing an FPGA-based PCI Express protocol solution.• Worked with hardware, software, and algorithm teams from design conception through product delivery, ensuring program success.• Developed systems level engineering design documentation and requirements specifications for customer design reviews and deliverables, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.• Created and used metrics for making accurate labor measurements following the Earned Value Management process, identifying variances early while maintaining cost and schedule performance.• Worked with multi-disciplinary teams to determine system-level performance impacts of hardware changes resulting in a decrease in production costs.

Malvern, Pa

Collaborated with FPGA and ASIC design teams to develop FPGA based PCI Express prototype hardware. Responsibilities included: simulation, synthesis, and debug of Verilog RTL Code, and the development of gate level and back annotating timing simulations.