Dan Strother Email & Phone Number

Pittsburgh, Pa

Pittsburgh, Pa

Vancouver, Wa

- Member of a small team responsible for designing and supporting an FPGA-based ASIC emulation platform used for verification and early firmware development for HP's custom Inkjet Printer control ASICs.- Supported hardware emulator platform consisting of six Virtex-4 FPGAs on a custom 24-layer PCB.- Partitioned and synthesized Verilog and VHDL RTL code for an entire ASIC design into multiple FPGAs.- Specified and designed new PCBs to extend emulator's functionality to support validation of new ASIC features (e.g. PCIe and proprietary LVDS links).- Developed custom FPGA-targeted IP for efficiently multiplexing/serializing multiple AXI buses between FPGAs using limited PCB interconnect.- Specified and architected next-generation Virtex-6 based emulation platform.- Trained/mentored new emulation team members.- Designed and verified new ASIC block for real-time hardware decompression of proprietary run-length-encoded image format. Block was verified using directed test and SystemVerilog constrained-random test-bench. The block was integrated into an existing high-performance imaging pipeline.- Debugged multiple PCI-Express bus issues encountered during ASIC bring-up, and proposed novel firmware workarounds for identified issues.- Developed FPGA prototypes for other engineering teams, including: a quadrature-encoder resolution divider for interfacing high-resolution sensors to existing hardware systems; and an LVDS data stream demultiplexer for driving multiple serialized LVDS channels from a single ASIC channel.- Created cost-saving real-time-clock alternative using low-power PIC microcontroller.

- Worked on JPL's 2nd-generation Airborne Precipitation Radar (APR-2).- Developed simulation models of APR-2's FPGA-based DSP engine using C and MATLAB.- Used models to root-cause source of anomalous errors in radar's output.

- Specified, designed and implemented control firmware for Atmel AVR microcontroller based designs.- Wrote firmware for 12-channel R/C servo driver with 3 serial interfaces, binary and plain-text protocols.