Daniel Strother — Electrical Engineer
dan.strother@gmail.com — https://danstrother.com/ — Pittsburgh, PA
Skilled multidisciplinary electrical engineer with intuitive understanding of complex electrical, software, and mechanical systems. Specialties include: high-speed FPGA/ASIC design, architecture, and simulation/verification; embedded microcontrollers and firmware; and, schematic and PCB design/layout.
Work Experience
Senior Engineer – Pittsburgh, PA – February 2012 to Present
Carnegie Robotics LLC
- Robots!
Electrical Engineer – Vancouver, WA – June 2007 to January 2012
Hewlett Packard
- Digital ASIC Emulation Engineer
- Member of a small team responsible for designing and supporting an FPGA-based ASIC emulation platform used for verification and early firmware development for HP’s custom Inkjet Printer control ASICs.
- Supported hardware emulator platform consisting of six Virtex-4 FPGAs on a custom 24-layer PCB.
- Partitioned and synthesized Verilog and VHDL RTL code for an entire ASIC design into multiple FPGAs.
- Specified and designed new PCBs to extend emulator’s functionality to support validation of new ASIC features (e.g. PCIe and proprietary LVDS links).
- Developed custom FPGA-targeted IP for efficiently multiplexing/serializing multiple AXI buses between FPGAs using limited PCB interconnect.
- Specified and architected next-generation Virtex-6 based emulation platform.
- Trained/mentored new emulation team members.
- Digital ASIC Design Engineer
- Designed and verified new ASIC block for real-time hardware decompression of proprietary run-length-encoded image format. Block was verified using directed test and SystemVerilog constrained-random test-bench. The block was integrated into an existing high-performance imaging pipeline.
- Debugged multiple PCI-Express bus issues encountered during ASIC bring-up, and proposed novel firmware workarounds for identified issues.
- Electrical Engineer
- Developed FPGA prototypes for other engineering teams, including: a quadrature-encoder resolution divider for interfacing high-resolution sensors to existing hardware systems; and an LVDS data stream demultiplexer for driving multiple serialized LVDS channels from a single ASIC channel.
- Created cost-saving real-time-clock alternative using low-power PIC microcontroller.
Intern – Pasadena, CA – June 2006 to August 2006
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Worked on JPL’s 2nd-generation Airborne Precipitation Radar (APR-2).
- Developed simulation models of APR-2’s FPGA-based DSP engine using C and MATLAB.
- Used models to root-cause source of anomalous errors in radar’s output.
Intern – Pullman, WA – June 2005 to January 2006
Digilent Inc.
- Specified, designed and implemented control firmware for Atmel AVR microcontroller based designs.
- Wrote firmware for 12-channel R/C servo driver with 3 serial interfaces, binary and plain-text protocols.
Student – Pullman, WA – September 2004 to May 2007
Robotics Club at Washington State University
- Lead EE on “Eddie” – a Mars-rover inspired autonomous 6-wheeled rocker-bogie style robot.
- Developed custom 12-channel motor controller with closed-loop PID control and I2C bus.
- Designed sensor systems with electronic compass, ultrasonic distance sensors, touch sensors, and pan/tilt camera.
- Created fault-tolerant communications protocols for I2C bus and host-computer serial interface.
- Developed control firmware and low-level driver software in C and C++.
Education
Washington State University – Pullman, WA – August 2004 to May 2007
B.S. Electrical Engineering
- Emphasis on embedded digital systems, with elective course-work in: digital logic design, microprocessor and computer architecture, digital signal processing, digital communications systems, and control systems.
- 3.81 GPA within BSEE program (3.73 overall); Minor in Computer Engineering.
Independent Projects
- FPGA-accelerated stereo-vision
Actively developing an open-source FPGA-based vision platform consisting of modular synthesizable Verilog blocks for camera interfacing, image rectification, stereo-correspondence, post-processing, DRAM interfacing, and PCIe interfacing; developed multiple custom PCBs for interfacing with Aptina image sensors and Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGAs. - Reflow oven controller
Converted a toaster-oven into a reflow soldering oven, using an AVR microcontroller, thermocouples, and solid-state relays; developed graphical control interface for oven in Python and QT; designed and tuned PID control loop using simulated system in Python. - Real-world Verilog interface
Developed Verilog PLI/VPI module to interface Icarus Verilog simulator with external hardware via a USB microcontroller; allows for existing simulation to transparently interact with real-world HW. - Brushless motor controller
Designed schematic, firmware, and custom PCB for 3-phase brushless DC motor controller, featuring: discrete MOSFET bridges, per-phase current and voltage sensing, on-board switch-mode power supply, CAN and RS-422 interfaces, and 32-bit ARM microcontroller. - FPGA NES clone
Cloned a complete Nintendo Entertainment System in an FPGA, including: development of custom tile/sprite-based graphics processing module, and integration of soft-core 6502 CPU. - Tesla Coils
Built high-frequency coils with various primary-side topologies, including: synchronous rotary spark-gap switched, multi-KW solid-state H-bridge driven, and even vacuum-tube modulated primaries. Solid-state designs used VCOs and PLLs with RF and current-based feedback to dynamically track system’s resonant frequency under load.
Skills
Electronics
- Schematic capture (Mentor, Cadence, EAGLE)
- PCB layout (EAGLE); PCB assembly
- High-speed: LVDS, DRAM
- High-power: motor controllers, switch-mode power supplies, high-voltage H-bridges
- Low-power: sleep/standby, power-gating
- Debug: oscilloscopes and logic-analyzers
- Simulation (SPICE)
Microcontrollers
- Atmel AVR, Microchip PIC, ARM
- C, assembly
- Hardware peripherals: timers/PWM, interrupts, ADCs, DACs, DMA, UART/SPI/I2C
- Fixed-point integer algorithms; Interrupt-driven processing
Miscellany
- OSs: Windows, Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)
- Office: Microsoft Office, OpenOffice
- Mech: CAD/CAM (SolidWorks), machine tools, CNC
- Web design: HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, Javascript
FPGAs/ASICs
- FPGAs: Xilinx, Altera
- HDLs: Verilog, VHDL
- HVLs: SystemVerilog, SystemC
- Verification methodologies:
- Directed test; Constrained-random
- Transactors/bus-functional-models
- Code coverage
- HW/SW co-verification
- High-frequency design:
- Pipelined logic; Critical-path optimization
- Floor-planning
- Device-primitive/netlist-based design
- High-speed interfaces:
- LVDS/SerDes; PCIe
- DDR DRAM
- AMBA-AXI
- Soft-core CPUs
Software
- C, C++, Perl, Python, MATLAB; Qt GUI framework
- Multi-threading; Non-blocking/asynchronous I/O
- Networking (sockets, packets/streams, UDP/TCP)
- Drivers