Austin, Texas, United States
Innovative electrical software/hardware engineer skilled in product development across a wide variety of technologies including electromagnetic simulators, antenna design, RFID, digital signal integrity, semiconductor packaging, electromagnetics, microwaves and RF, and IO circuit design.
Developing open-source parallel electromagnetic simulators. See https://openparem.org/.
Architected, designed, built, and tested a direct-conversion software-defined radio (SDR) implementing a UHF RFID discrete-component reader with state-of-the-art receive sensitivity better than -85 dBm. Developing a custom communications protocol for >2X increase in read range. Performed all phases from architecture definition, design, component selection, PCB layout and routing with KiCAD, PCB manufacturing interface, assembly, microcontroller programming with MPLAB X IDE, data processing algorithms, PC GUI programming with Visual Studio, and RF testing.
Conceived, designed, prototyped, and validated 20+ RF dipole and patch antennas forming UHF RFID sensors through the interaction of the antenna impedance with the adaptive front-end of custom RFID transponder chips. Smart diaper sensor trialed at several US adult residential facilities. Moisture sensor for leak testing trialed at major US and European auto manufacturers. Moisture sensor for plywood quality control trialed at a major European manufacturer. Temperature sensors (3000+) installed in a major US data center. Directed and supervised a team of three application and software engineers.
In addition to the solutions and applications work described above, lead a 5-person team through the design and validation of two sensor-enabled UHF RFID transponder SOCs in a 0.18 um TSMC extremely low-power RFID process. Performed lab work uncovering performance issues in the chips.
Developed leading-edge signal and power integrity methodologies, flows, software, documentation, and training. Re-designed the power structures enabling a 10% cost reduction for high-performance BGA substrates. Enabled a 10% jitter reduction in 10 GHz SerDes through improved power distribution. Managed a team of 3 BGA package design engineers plus 3 electrical engineers optimizing packagelevel signal and power integrity.