PROFILE:

• Highly skilled Embedded Firmware Engineer who has devoted over 25 - Years to creating reliable and efficient high-complexity electronic products to serve the consumer, industrial and defense markets.
• Day-to-day proven and successful roles in the full software development cycle, including extensive experience developing and personally conducting intensive firmware and software testing at all levels of integration and in final product configurations.
• Well acquainted with debug and electronic test tools including logic analyzers, in-circuit emulators, oscilloscopes and GUI test sets. Skilled in both formal rigorous testing against design and implementation requirements and in ad-hoc stress testing seeking to uncover system limits and potential product flaws.
• My long history developing large and complex embedded firmware products has honed my skill in uncovering potential stress-points.
• Proficient at envisioning final products and capturing their details, features and operations into high and low-level requirements and specifications that can be succinctly tested and verified. Focused on developing code from requirements that is intuitively structured, well-documented, and easily comprehended and maintained.
• An intensely skilled coder in C, C++, assembly and various esoteric languages with an eye for code-speed and compactness.
• Often teamed together with other engineering disciplines to partition product functionality between software and hardware.
• Years of intimate, in-the-trenches, daily full-life-cycle product support: from developing initial concepts, to team-brainstorming design, through product introduction followed by long-term maintenance that often spans the continued evolution of market need, introduction of competing products and on-going hardware availability.
• Well accomplished at uncovering anomalous product performance and working seamless repairs, whether caused by coding errors or design oversights. Fully experienced in all aspects of firmware fault detection.
• Career developer of both large and small-scale embedded operating systems and kernels for high-integrity and life-safety critical systems, in both single core and in tightly-coupled multiprocessor networks.
• Demonstrated capability in marrying broad-range design objectives with intricate performance requirements to engineer high-reliability components to satisfy both tight schedule and cost constraints. Much expertise in developing low-level device drivers, interrupt and exception handlers for preexisting and custom RT kernels.
• Fully acquainted with many serial and parallel port interfaces, communications controllers, A/D and D/A converters and all manor of DRAM, ROM and Flash memories.
• Experienced with multiple design and project management methodologies, both strict and ad-hoc. Works well in both small and large team environments and independently. Degree in a natural science grants understanding of controlled-system physical behaviors in a real world.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE:

Development Languages: C (25yrs), C++(5yrs), Ada (10yrs), Various Assembly Languages (25yrs).

µController Types: Intel16/32/64, Renesas TX63N, MIPS Family, Coldfire, Freescale, 68K, PowerPC, ARM, TI OMAP/TMS340, Fujitsu and various other CISC and RISC cores, various ASICs and FPGAs

IDE/Toolkit Environments: IAR Embedded Workbench, SVN, SCCS, CVS, CMS, CoRE, Rational, CASE, DSEE, StP, Unix/Solaris, MSDN, FSF, Various BSPs and many others

Bus Architectures: PCI Bus, USB, VMEbus, Multibus, PC/104, SELBus

Comm Protocols: IEEE 802.3, 802.11, 802.15, 802.16, ZigBee, Mil-Std-1553B, RS-232/RS-422, USB 2.0 and many other synchronous, asynchronous, parallel, discrete and analog protocols

Storage devices: Flash Memories (NAND/NOR), SD Cards, EEPROM, many HDDs, many others

Quality Standards: RTCA/DO-178B Level A, IEEE-1228-1994, SEI Level 3 (CoRE), ISO-9001

Commercial Kernel/RTOS Familiarity: QNX, ThreadX, RTLinux, pSOS, RTEMS, QNX, GNULinux, VxWorks, many others

RELEVANT WORK EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Atlanta, GA

Firmware Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Team member designing, implementing and testing firmware for embedded processors in digital energy meters.
• Firmware communicates via ZigBee with various power consumption and reporting devices.
• Work performed in standard C for a Renesas RX63N processor using E20 emulation environment.

Confidential, Norcross, GA

Embedded Software Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Design, implementation, test and support of company’s Platinum Plus interactive gaming product.
• Creation of firmware to drive TI-based graphics engine, external serial communications and application software to add several new features including QR Code generation, visual color pattern test displays and updated printer support.
• Maintenance of legacy product in C and TMS340 assembly language.
• Owner/Operator of small general construction business and performed in the building service trades as a union electrician and HVAC/refrigeration technician for commercial and government customers.
• Also worked 18-months in retail sales management vending and installing professional studio and audio products for churches, rock’n’roll bands, single performers, dance clubs, DJs and theme restaurants.

Firmware Engineer

Confidential, Atlanta, GA

Responsibilities:

• Created emulations of MEMS hardware components then in development to evaluate and iteratively draft requirements for proposed operating system supplements.
• Evaluated GNU compilers and various commercial embedded operating systems (pSOS, RTEMS) to determine suitability against system timing and throughput requirements.
• Evaluation software written primarily in C++.
• Software controlled complex chemical analysis using discrete I/O and reported results to networked devices via LAN interface using HTML/XML.
• Developed in GNU C/C++ using StP modeling tool for a PowerPC / RTEMS target. developed and integrated custom wireless communications and power management features into company s next - generation mobile monitor/ control platform. Target was a 486/PII running embedded Win3.1.
• Development used C++ and SourceSafe. designed and incorporated BACNet UDP socket and packet distribution support into embedded components of a PowerPC-based building automation control system running under pSOS. Also added DHCP support. Work was in Diab C/C++. developed an embedded command / response monitor to test and configure new hardware components based on newly developed mSparc-based Explorer 2000 digital CATV set-top boxes.
• Created monitor to interact with existing production test-set jig apparatus using RS-232 serial and broadband ethernet connections.
• Work was in Cygnus C and C++.
• Created support to extract call data records from remote telephone switches using X.25 into a proprietary data management / fraud detection system. Software developed using Borland C and C++.
• System controlled transport and labeling of bulk rolls of kraft paper as they were milled and spooled by mill apparatus. Work was in Vax C.

Confidential, Marietta, GA

Staff Embedded Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for original design, implementation and Confidential test certification of kernel components and operating system of 3-node multiprocessor secure network of mission computers managing avionics, displays, throttle controls, radio communications.
• Led team of 6 in object-oriented detailed design, implementation, integration and test of high-throughput, very-high-reliability safety critical RTOS kernel supporting lock-step interactivity and communication between 100 application processes and 150 aircraft hardware devices controlling all aspects of flight operations in a triple-redundant multiprocessor architecture.
• Work was in Aonix Ada-83 & 95.
• Developed kernel components to support deterministic process scheduling, I/O management, software and hardware fault detection and correction, exception and interrupt management, load shedding and on-the-fly dynamic system reconfiguration.
• Code developed 90% in Aonix Ada and 10% assembly language for MIPS R5000 series processors.
• Prototype software developed in Telesoft C. Created deterministic load shedding / restoration methodology in event of critical component failure, hardware or software.
• System would proactively probe for anomalous behavior and predicatively respond to hard and soft failures at all levels of criticality.
• Designed, developed and tested software/firmware supporting power-up bootstrap, processor/memory/device initialization, continuous hardware and system built-in-test, dynamic process scheduling management and various low-level device drivers which interacted directly with controllers, ASICs and FPGAs.
• Contributor in early design cycle decisions: hardware/software partitioning, development and test methodologies, software development standards, implementation language, schedule and milestones.
• Employed SEI Consortium Requirements Engineering (CoRE) methodology.
• Development process met requirements of ISO-9001, SEI Level 3 and RTCA/DO-178B Level A.