Howdy (fake 'Aussie' accent, not nearly as good as Dave's) , the name's Vincent Himpe but i go by the handle free_electron. I started electronics by burning my finger on a, too hot, transistor in a little radio when i was about 6 or 7 years old. After finishing school at 18 i ended up as a maintenance tech in a semiconductor waferfab. I did wet-etch, plasma-etch and ion-implantation as well as lithographic equipment and some other wacky machines like ashers, vapour deposition and sputtering machines. After successfully troubleshooting the electronic assemblies, at component level, ( they used to get shipped back to the manufacturer at exorbitant prices ) and doing some 'upgrades' to some of these machines i moved on to the R&D lab. I made the eval and prototype boards for newly minted silicon , wrote firmware and test software (GPIB) and debugged the chips using lasercutters , die probers e-beam machines and FIB equipment.
I helped debug and design the first ADSL chipsets in 1995, long before anyone had even heard about this technology. I designed the board ( 12 layer pcb ) with the line interface, analog frontend , a/d d/a , the modem ASIC as well as the first CARM chip (an ARM7 with a cache controller. We were the first users.. even ARM hadn't tried that one yet.. there were no compilers. Only a JTAG debugger that let you poke around in the RAM directly in HEX... I wrote the bootloader for the CARM in hand crafted assembly and translated it, by hand in HEX so it could be punched in, as well as the board-level downloader . This code is still in use today as it is now a standard for booting the ADSL firmware. It sits in mask ROM and cannot be altered.
In 2000 i moved to a new design center to assist in the mass deployment of ADSL technology. I was responsible for the R&D lab , the design of the reference and application boards as well as the engineering proto's. We had our own in-house pick and place and reflow oven to do quick-time ( less than 4 hour) prototypes of boards.
After the comms bubble burst in 2003, i dabbled some more in ADSL and then moved on to Bluetooth after the ADSL group was disbanded.
Having figured out after a few months that this was a dead-end technology i moved on to a new horizon. Bluetooth was conceived when 300 kilopixel camera's were the norm. They had grand idea's of people taking snapshots and sending them through bluetooth from the camera to the printer. By the time the first bluetooth chips were commercially viable and mass deployment had begun we had 3 megapixel camera's. And sending a single image would take 10 seconds... All the grand visions they had for bluetooth never materialized as it was obsolete by the time it hit the mass market. Killed by its too low data bandwidth. Wifi had taken over and bluetooth was relished to simple things like keyboards, mixe and little earpieces. For anything else it was too slow.
So , beginning 2005 i entered a new world: that of the datastorage and harddisks. Today i am perpetually pondering on new ways to make the silvery platters that people thrust their data to, spin smoothly. Make circuitry to position the head even faster and more accurately, all while checking for shocks, rotations, drops, vibrations and keeping the power consumption of the SOC and preamps on the heads in check. When an unexpected event causes power loss i recuperate the energy stored in the spinning disks ( by using the brushelss three phase motor as generator ) to safely complete a write operation and then retract and park the heads off the platter. If your computer contains a harddisk that is younger then 5 years there is a better than 70% chance it's got a chip in it that i helped design, debug and write code for (can't take all the credit. This is a team effort of over 50 people). I am still repsonsible for the eval boards and platform , the drive board level code ( the API to the drive algorithms, call it the HAL ) . I make all the development boards (Altium/Solidworks since it has to mate with the drive mechanics) write the eval code (8051 in PL/M and ARM7 in C / Assembly, FPGA in Verilog before it ends up in the ASIC) and write the test system on the PC to tdrive the eval board and all instrumentation ( GPIB/ USB/ Ethernet ) . PC code is Visual Basic / C# mixture with a gateway to a python and matlab test-scripting and visualisation backbone.
In my spare time i dabble with any electronics i can lay hands on. Living in Silicon Valley has its advantage that all the good trade shows are in-town and it is easy to get free development kits.
I have published multiple books on electronics (Dave showed my previous one in #251) and am writing a bunch more.
When not dealing with electronics ( hard to believe , but yes, every year i 'pull the plug' on electronics for three weeks -literally- ) i can be found on some tropical reef , a tank with 32% oxygen strapped on the back , video or photocamera in hand , chasing all kinds of little critters. I have two unbreakable rules when it comes to scuba diving : i want an ocean that is 80 degrees F or more ( 27 celcius ) and 100 ft ( 30 meters) of visibility. The best piece of diving gear is an airplane... because it takes you to a warm ocean.
I got my own domain :
www.siliconvalleygarage.comStill wondering why that transistor was so hot...
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