Work primarily in manufacturing testing PCBs & cables. Also work as a part-time electronics engineer for new designs, and as a sustaining engineer for older designs

Work as a QA "inspector", testing their latest products, to make sure they do what they say they do, offering solutions to problems as they arise, then moved on to more engineering type work, as well as writing application notes, with accompanying demo programs.

Reverse engineered a temperature controller board for the "hot melt" industry

* Developed a MIL-STD-1553 Remote Terminal, integrating a 3rd party IP core into an Altera FPGA, drawing the schematic and performing the PCB layout.* Developed an expertise manually routing BGA surface mount components.* Performed the parts research necessary for the job, minimizing new and/or long lead items. * Designed numerous DC/DC switching converters, matching the power supplies to the loads, for maximum power efficiency* Did not wait for a job assignments, preferring to take the initiative, to do what I thought needed done without explicitly asking for permission (in most cases), getting the indirect “OK” from my boss through periodic status reports.* Diagnosed & fixed a bootloader problem that the software engineer was not able to fix. * Assisted the program manager by “volunteering” to create combined project schematic, consolidating the work of several engineers, for better parts management, etc..* Developed the reputation as the “go to” guy whenever there were special projects that needed to be done in a timely manner, to the satisfaction of Management

Worked with Xilinx EDK to add more memory to an existing Xilinx Microblaze implementation. Performed the layout and routing of numerous densely packed PCBs. for example, one card was 8 ½ “ x 12” and had approx. 1800 components. this work included a lot of high current switching, a triple redundant (“fault tolerant”) architecture, & the making of all electrical and mechanical libraries.

* Designed both standard and non-standard (proprietary) i2c controllers, which utilize a 2-wire bus to communicate with various sensors. These controllers are software configurable and incorporate various memory/FIFO interfaces as needed, along with CRC error detection capability. Designed using hierarchical VHDL modules. * Also developed a digital interface to a laser position detector (high speed A/D converter). This interface controlled the A/D conversion process in the detector, and featured a computation of the “centroid” of the laser spot by scaling the received data and, then performing various digital signal processing operations on the scaled data, including hardware division. * Developed VHDL testbenches and “C” code to test the above

Developed two microprocessor (80186) controlled TDM (time division multiplexed) bus “peripherals” * One was a “wide band” digital interface that used several dual port RAMs (ping-pong buffers) to simultaneously capture interface data for sending to the TDM bus as well as receiving data from a specific timeslot to be sent to the peripheral. * The second was a multipurpose board containing a non-volatile crosspoint switch, and an unusual multi-mode digital/analog receiver with fairly strict and somewhat contradictory performance specs in the various modes * Worked with manufacturing to design & build test fixtures and test procedures for the above

Calibrated and tested RF power amplifiers used in cellular base stations

Developed a VoIP conferencing system for the Military, in two steps, the first was to develop a digital equivalent of the existing analog system, and the second was to implement a UDP/IP stack inside a Xilinx FPGA with an embedded “microblaze” IP core

* Developed a PCI bus based video graphics card * Designed a large scale (over 16000 cu ft), scalable A/D converter system.

Worked on their COBRAnet implementation

* I was the first full-time engineer Apogee ever had, and for a long time, the only engineer they had, and was the principal designer for (the digital/FPGA-based portion of) a very large portion of their product line.* Products designed included the UV-1000, AD-1000, AD-8000, PSX-100 (all of which received the prestigious TEC - Technical Excellence and Creativity – award), as well as several OEM products..* Was the principal designer of the UV-1000 super CD encoder, which captures the detail of 20 bit signals flawlessly into the 16 bit domain, and which features a unique, user definable, DC removal algorithm. Developed a software encryption/hardware de-encryption algorithm to protect the above intellectual property* Spearheaded a change from their historical FPGA/hardware-based digital audio solution to a DSP/microprocessor/DMA-based solution for the AD-8000, convincing Management of the benefits, resulting in a more flexible and long lasting architecture. * Other Digital Signal Processing related processes developed for the Apogee product line included peak detection for (8 channel) bar graph metering, user definable “over” processing (unique to CD mastering), an overflow-proof 3 way adder (saturation arithmetic), “pull-up”/”pull down” sample rate conversion, “bit splitting” technology to record 96 khz 24 bit audio on multiple 48khz 16 bit DAT tracks. And more….

The company was originally Varian Data Machines, which was bought out by Sperry Univac, which was then bought out by Burroughs, which then became Unisys