Electrical Design Engineer
Hunt Valley, Md, Us
My primary responsibilities included circuit card design, FPGA firmware and embedded software development. I've designed with Intel Altera, Xilinx and Lattice FPGAs; have experience with Nios II and Microblaze softcore processors as well as Microchip, Atmel, and PowerPC processors. I've also designed with DDR memory, high speed LVDS interfaces and many communication interfaces such as Ethernet, USB, VME, etc. Some project highlights are:- Circuit card design and VHDL for a Xilinx Spartan FPGA with 16 ADC interfaces to microphones capturing the sonic waves of passing bullets. The design is similar to a digital oscilloscope in operation with the FPGA triggering on sonic thresholds and capturing data. The purpose of the design is to determine the direction of a fired bullet (my co-patent for an adaptable threshold was part of this project).- Xilinx Virtex VHDL firmware that included an embedded PowerPC 405, several 2.5 Gbps RocketIO interfaces, multiple RLDRAM-II memory interfaces, and an Ethernet soft core. Functions implemented in the FPGA were memory mapped to the PowerPC for software control. Purpose of the board was to manage an electronic warfare simulation timeline and channel alignment for eight combined RF synthesizers by steering RF pulses to available digital synthesizer channels.- Circuit card design and VHDL for a Xilinx Virtex FPGA and external PowerPC processor used as the motherboard for an aircraft radar test system. The FPGA reads stimulus vectors from an external memory and controls attenuators, PLLs, switch paths, and steering DACs in the RF subsystem to generate the desired RF output. The FPGA also modulates vectors to perform Doppler shift and antenna scan patterns on the RF output. In addition to the processor and FPGA, my hardware design included SDRAM, flash ROM, an Ethernet transceiver, dual port RAM, and an interface to a memory flash card. The PowerPC ran an embedded OS and our custom software.