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

Carnegie Robotics LLC

• Robots!

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.

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.

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.

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

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