Longmont, Colorado, United States
I am an Electronics Engineer (BSEE) living in Boulder County near Longmont, Colorado. I have been working as an independent engineer through my own company (Dynamic Engineering Corporation). I design embedded electronic systems which contain FPGAs and microcontrollers - hardware, firmware and software. Generally, these systems interface with a host computer via a standard interface such as PCI Express. I tend to work with small companies that do not have sufficient electronic design activity to justify the in-house staff. I have access to PCB Layout designers and Signal Integrity consultants. I can also coordinate the fabrication and assembly of PCBs (Printed Circuit boards) to provide a full turnkey solution for my clients. Specialties: FPGA design using VHDL, Embedded Systems, Electronic Hardware design, Microcontroller firmware, "C", "C++", "C#" and Matlab programming, PCIe, PCI Express, Xilinx Virtex and Spartan FPGAs
I Design embedded systems (electronic hardware, firmware and software) containing FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and microcontrollers. Generally, these systems interface with a host computer via a standard interface such as PCI Express. I tend to work with small companies that do not have sufficient electronic design activity to justify the in-house staff. I have access to PCB Layout designers and Signal Integrity consultants. I can also coordinate the fabrication and assembly of PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) to provide a full turn-key solution for my clients. I incorporated Dynamic Engineering Corporation as a means to supplement my experience and income while otherwise working full-time. I left Cirrus Logic, Inc. in 1998 with the intent of taking a year off to work on my house. I have been working as an independent engineer ever since. (note: I listed the start date above simply to convince LinkedIn to list this entry first). I've listed a number of my clients below - broken out separately to make it a bit easier to read.
I am responsible for the design of all the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) and PCIe (PCI Express) interfaced systems for BNS’s SLMs (Spatial-Light Modulators). These systems interface a Personal Computer (PC) via either PCI or PCIe to a collection of propriety LCD (Liquid-Crystal Display) devices using either 32 or 64 analog channels. I carry out all aspects of the design - from system architecture, through detailed hardware design (including schematic entry, parts selection, overseeing the board layout process, coordination with a signal-integrity consultant, board fabrication and assembly, etc.), the FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) design (using VHDL), writing Windows test software in C# and C++, debug and test of the first articles and documentation.
Designed the antenna control system for an Advanced Radar Wind Profiler. This design consists of 2 boards, one contains 2 Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGAs and a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller, the other a Xilinx XPLA CPLD. I architected the system, wrote the firmware for the FPGAs and the CPLD in VHDL and wrote the code for the microcontroller in C. I worked with an engineer who incorporated my designs into the final boards. I also wrote a test program (in C#) and authored the interface document. This system allows the phases of 32 antennas to be independently controlled. Eight copies of this design are used on a 449MHz, 256 antenna element wind profiler designed for the National Weather Service to shape the beam.
• Architected, designed, and wrote the code for a Texas Instruments MSP430 (in C) for a board that controlled 6 stepper motors via an I2C interface. Wrote a Windows based test program in C#. Worked closely with a small team of engineers to integrate the communication of this design to the host processor. Authored the Detailed Design Document • Designed a system consisting of 2 Renesas MC16 microcontrollers, a quarter-VGA color LCD and an inexpensive 8-bit, externally connected microcontroller
I worked with the company's PRML (Partial-Response Maximum-Likelihood) read channels. In particular, I interfaced these channels to customer and off-the-shelf disk drives to test performance and gather data for analysis to apply to future generation read channels and support on drive calibrations. I wrote numerous models in Matlab and "C" to simulate the write and read data paths of a disk drive read channel and study the effects of the non-linearities produced by Magneto-Resistive (MR) heads and modeled various schemes to compensate for them. Responsible for all aspects of the company's spin-stand including: integration, test definition and implementation utilizing PRML read channels, a digital scope and Matlab. Implemented numerous head/disk parametric tests (SNR, Overwrite PW50, etc.) culminating with the infamous “747” test.