Don Hoefer Email & Phone Number

Hardware, software and system design for space systems.

Sole electronics engineer with a small optical networking component startup. Performed analog and DSP circuit design and coded embedded software for precision control loop. Managed outside contractors that performed sub-tasks for the circuit design and software development. Performed hardware and system test.

Performed circuit design for embedded Power PC based optical networking systems.Provided CAD and design process planning and support and designed an electronic parts database.Contributing member of group that selected the corporate PDM system.Wrote automation scripts to couple CAD tools to outside data.

Supported and maintained Digital's in-house signal integrity simulation software suite. Provided user support, debugging, documentation and implemented enhancements.Software ran on Alpha workstations and servers under Digital Unix and Ultrix on 64 and 32 bit platforms respectively.System consisted of a command line parallel processing capable back end simulator with an X-Window graphical user interface. Users could not only view simulation results but could also directly edit the results and re-simulate to study the effect of changes prior to implementation in the hardware design. Written in C and C++.Embedded a Tcl command interpreter for the graphical user interface so that users could utilize initialization and script files.

Performed analog and digital circuit design as well as FPGA design and test for space systems.Wrote test software in C for hardware testing. Wrote many small test programs structured such that they could be combined into scripts.Set up an electronic CAD system for schematic entry and simulation for circuit and FPGA design. Automated drawing checking and release from the system.Provided CAD support for electronic design entry, simulation and printed circuit board design.

Performed circuit and system design for airborne military infrared imaging systems.Notable accomplishments (really dating myself here):The first in my division to use programmable logic devices - had to build my own programmer.Built the first image digitizer for a scanner product line. Used 20 MSPS A/D converters, cutting edge at the time, ho-hum now. The prototype included a wire-wrapped ECL circuit to multiplex and serialize the data from 12 A/D converters.