Hardware Engineer at ASML (Veldhoven) via TMCHardware Engineer at Canon Production Printing (Venlo) via TMC

1) Electronic & Test Development Engineer @ GTX Medical in Eindhoven, Nov 2019 - Mar 2020.2) EMC Engineer @ Jabil in Hasselt, May to Oct 2019• Performing pre-compliance Radiated Emission measurements (CISPR 32 and 25, FCC 15, 24, 27)• Performing Conducted Emission measurements (CISPR 32)• Perform Radiated Immunity testing according to (IEC 61000-4-3)• Perform Conducted Immunity testing according to (IEC 61000-4-6)• Exposure to Rohde & Schwarz CMW500 for LTE module control & communication• Analyze EMC failures, propose solutions.• Organize EMC lab , maintenance of equipment.• Troubleshoot and repair fibre-optic controlled antenna mast motor controller.3) Hardware Engineer @ Mewit in Eindhoven, Apr 2019• Review and analyze NFC tuning design.• Measure NFC tuning circuit matching with a USB vector network analyzer• Tuning of NFC transceiver circuit in an iterative process• Perform functional tests with various NFC card types to validate matching.4) Hardware Engineer @ TMC TElab, Voetbalschieter project, Eindhoven, Mar to Jun 2019• Troubleshooting control-boards and power-electronic modules, repair to fully operational state.• Generate ideas for alternative ball shooting mechanisms.• Review previous firmware, insert commenting, generate FW flowcharts• Build simplified control board versions, including FW

Lead engineer on a UV Germicidal Irradiation project aimed at Tuberculosis prevention, being responsible for specification generation, mechanical and electrical design, liaising with other engineers on the development of electronic subsystems and project planning. Senior intellectual property engineer of the company, responsible for IP searches, generation of patent specifications and drawings, corresponding with the company's patent attorneys, managing the company’s patent and trademark portfolio, processing patent examination reports and the presentation thereof and discussion with the CEO, generating examination responses. Also involved with high temperature operating life (HTOL) testing and analysis of LED lighting driver IC’s.

This was the first start-up I joined. Balancell develops products for large battery pack balancing and monitoring. As such, all electronics have to sealed against the ingress of sulfuric acid. This led to me learning to use SolidWorks, designing aluminium molds for low pressure overmolding, testing plastics for sulfuric acid resistance and prototyping a number of overmolded enclosures. I was also responsible for the compilation and up-keep of a project plan that detailed the development activities of the start-up, as well for the identification of applicable EMC, Safety and Radio standards. I am quite proud of the one overmolding where we enclosed a circuit with blinking LED's in plastic, and dunked it into something like 70% pure sulfuric acid (if I remember correctly), to see how long it will last. The LED's were still blinking months after my departure, according to my ex-colleagues...

One aspect of my position involved prototyping new ideas for the application of the company's capacitive touch sensing IC's. I also realized a type of finite element simulation within Excel (!) of touch screen electrode linearization patterns. A large part of my time was spent on EMC, and I was instrumental in the development and setup of an in-house pre-compliance EMC facility for Conducted Emissions, Radiated Emissions (conducted measurement), Conducted Susceptibility, EFT, ESD, Surge etc. I designed, built and qualified CDN's and a LISN, all of which are still being used. Also wrote a number of EMC app notes, solved EMC problems and identified applicable standards. My forray into Intellectual Property also started in earnest during this period, being responsible for all prior art searches, generating patent specifications and drawings, corresponding with the company's patent attorneys, processing patent examination reports and presentation thereof and discussion with the CEO, and formulating and submitting examination responses.

Itron was an eye-opener to the worlds of utility metering and large corporations. Things were done differently, and in a much more structured manner. As a hardware design engineer, I re-designed an 868MHz data radio used for automatic meter reading, designed a single phase smart meter (as part of a multi-disciplinary team), was responsible for the system design and project management for a modular 3-Phase supply, substantially improved my EMC knowledge and got good exposure to accelerated life testing and high volume production. I really enjoyed the hardware design tasks. However, what stands out is the initiative I proposed and realized to promote innovation within the South Africa sector of the company. Encouraged by my line manager, I presented a proposal on innovation promotion and a company wide idea repository, first to senior management and then to the whole company. The idea was simple. With 400 odd employees, there were a lot of great ideas floating around. These had to be captured and reviewed to find the golden ones. The initiative merged into a type of team-building activity, where departments were encouraged to brainstorm a few ideas while having some fun, funded by the company. We paid people in chocolates for ideas (not joking), and senior management reviewed ideas on a quarterly basis, with gift voucher prizes for the best ones.

Sygade was an interesting company to work at, being heavily involved in the development of hand-held computing terminals (Tablets was still a bit into the future in 2004) and RFID readers. But it also had a background in sports monitoring equipment and a relationship with the Sports Science Institute in Cape Town. I was initially employed as en electronic development engineer, but this branched out into Antenna Design engineer, due to my post-grad electromagnetics background. I designed a number of planar antennas (patch antennas and linear arrays) using Sonnet simulation software, and prototyped and tested them with fairly limited resources. But the project that I am most proud of, is developing a heart rate and core temperature wireless monitoring system for the Sports Science Institute and well known swimmer Lewis Pugh with a colleague, Johan Dirker, in record time. If I remember correctly, we had 3 weeks, from briefing to delivering two systems to the Sports Science team at Cape Town International who were on their way to Antarctica, where Lewis Pugh would set a new swimming world record in almost freezing water. The system had to be rechargeable, waterproof, transfer the data via a 433MHz link and not inhibit Lewis's swimming too much. Johan focussed on the firmware while I was responsible for the hardware design and prototyping. We slept little near the end of the project, but we made it!

This was my first position after university. I held a general electronic development engineer position, and worked on diverse projects. Three prominent ones are the coding of an FFT in Assembly for a TI DSP chip, development of minimalist boost converter and development of an FPGA board. The latter was used by the IC design team at Azoteq to simulate their designs. I think I was most proud of the boost converter - it was quite simple but elegant, used a 555 circuit and fitted completely within the head of a well-known torch brand to facilitate replacement of the incandescent bulb with a high brightness LED....still a new concept in 2003.