Resume of Computer System Architect

Title
Computer System Architect

Primary Skills
Computer System Architect/Engineer/Technologist/Engineering Manager

Location
US-TX-Austin

Posted
Nov-27-07


Summary:

Computer System Architect/Engineer/Technologist/Engineering Manager
- 20+ year veteran developing unique leading edge computer systems of all sizes; for
commercial, scientific, military, telecom, and embedded sectors.
- Creative visionary with many patents for creating leading edge architectures, technologies, and
industry standards.
- Successful in forming, leading, and managing high performance development
teams, both centralized and distributed.
- Excellent written, oral, and interpersonal communication skills.
- A never ending desire to learn, and to create new products.

Career History [most recent first]

COVI TECHNOLOGIES, Austin, Texas 2007
Manager of Hardware Engineering
- Development of world class video surveillance systems.
- Managed a small team of electrical and mechanical engineers
- Corrected signal integrity and EMC problems which were stopping the company from shipping
products by designing custom shaped, shielded, impedance controlled flex circuits connecting
fixed video processor boards to 3-degree rotation sensors.
- Converted PATA based digital video controllers to SATA based.
- Took a number of previous products through Agency testing, correcting numerous EMI, EMC,
and ESD problems along the way.
- Sole ECAD support for the company using ORCAD, Allegro, and Autocad

SUN MICROSYSTEMS, Austin, Texas 2005 - 2006
Chief Engineer - Workgroup Systems
- Lead engineer for Suns N1290, N210, and N240 Telecom Servers.
- Entered a lab with no system hardware expertise for the N1290; a 12 CPU, partitionable, self
healing, high reliability Telecom server; a lab which was faced with a customer escalation to the
highest levels of the company due to field failures during NEBS testing. I had no experience in
Telecom, no experience in NEBS testing, and no knowledge of the machine. It was my job to fault
isolate and correct the problem. I learned the machine, learned the agency test requirements, and
root caused the problem. The problem was due to a metallurgy issue where under-developed
solder paste residue on DIMMs, subjected to high temperature and humidity during testing,
resulted in barely visible copper oxide salt deposits on the sheared edges of memory PCB mating
connectors causing random, unrepeatable errors. Time to solution - two months.
- Upgraded the N1290 to the latest CPU, memory, and storage technologies; along with resultant
changes in power distribution and cooling; including personally redesigning one of the PCBs,
performing thermal analysis and verification, and leading the overall development team.
- Upgraded the N240 to the latest CPU, memory, and storage technology, performed thermal
analysis and verification, and performed the overall product lifecycle planning for EOL.
- Assumed support of the N210 - Led a team of engineers who were geographically distributed
across the US and Thailand.
- Sun was having financial problems. In April, 2006, the company effectively terminated the Austin
systems lab. I chose to pursue other alternatives in lieu of relocating to California.



PROSPER HIGH SCHOOL, Prosper, Texas
2004 - 2005 [During the worst of the DotCom crash]
Teacher - High School Physics
- A period of semi-retirement, retraining, and teaching.
- Upgraded my skill set with software courses in VB and VC++.
- Self study and passed the required tests to begin teaching High School Physics and Calculus.
- Enjoyed a year of teaching High School juniors and seniors.
- Accepted a position with Sun Microsystems, moved to Austin; re-entered the engineering field.

HEWLETT PACKARD, Richardson, Texas
1995 - 2002
System Architect/Engineer/Technologist
- Formed, trained, and lead engineering teams to develop the system architecture and
technologies for next generation products, beginning with the development for the companies
flagship Superdome products.
- Performed the detailed design of critical areas including high speed system interconnects and
clock distribution.
- Lead the industry wide development, testing, and specification efforts for all physical layers of
the Infiniband Standard.
- Performed the detailed design of the physical interconnect layers for the most recent
Superdome product (code name Arches) consisting of hundreds of 3Gb/sec differential
interconnect signals over two ~18x32 inch backplanes. This interconnect was derived
directly from my Infiniband technology work.
- Worked with PCB and interconnect vendors to develop advanced PCB and connector
technologies for a variety of future products.
- Presented product plans to perspective customers.
- Presented technology issues and advancements in various industry forums.
- In 2002 Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq, and all HP labs were required to integrate Compaq
employees at the expense of existing HP employees.

CONVEX COMPUTER CORPORATION, Richardson, Texas
1982 - 1995
System Architect/Engineer/Technologist
- Lead the architectural development and technology development for new products.
- Lead the detailed design and implementation of critical areas of many products.
- Lead the system design, performed detailed logic and PCB design, and system debug for the
first MiniSuper Computer.
- Designed and programmed a real time hardware performance analysis system to architect the
second generation system, including patented hardware self-scheduling mechanisms.
- Lead the technology analysis, established the design rules, designed the CAD databases, and
did the detailed design of the second generation vector machine based on 100K ECL.
- Lead the technology analysis, architectural design, and interconnect planning; while making
major contributions to the power distribution planning, and overall mechanical design of the third
generation vector machine based on GaAs.
- Recognized the industry wide shift to microprocessor / standards based systems.
- Helped drive the completion of the Sbus, USB, and SCI standards.
- When Convex partnered with HP, I drove key changes in the HP RISC coherency protocols to
support high end systems.
- Incorporated these standards, along with Hewlett-Packards first 64bit Risk CPU, and architected
the first parallel super scalar machine consisting of up to 256 64-b it CPUs in a single coherent
environment.
- Directly supported the company officers with presentations to customers, the board of directors,
vendors, etc.
- Participated in many industry standard developments, including HiPPI, SCI, Sbus, and IEEE-
1394.
- Lead the architectural development of the final Convex parallel super scalar machine. HP made
a bid to buy Convex because we were building machines around their processors that they had
been unable to design in house.
- Convex Computer was purchased by Hewlett-Packard. I was placed in charge of an HP wide
team to develop the architecture and technology for the first HP Enterprise Server - The HP
SuperDome series.

TEXAS INSTRUMENTS, Austin/Richardson, Texas
1972 - 1982
System Engineer / Design Engineer
- Designed two control boards in 2500 ECL logic and two memory boards using both bipolar and
MOS memories for the ASC Vector Computer. All boards contained ~400 integrated circuits. All
boards were defect free.
- Architected and designed the first commercial DataFlow machine.
- Architected the successor to the ASC using 100K ECL logic.
- Architected the Data Processor for the Army VHSIC program using I2L logic.
- Brought the first ECAD systems into TI for use on a 'Black' military program.
- Left TI to help form Convex Computer, a new start-up.

Education:

Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas
BSEE (1971) and MSEE with a minor in Business Management (1972)

Professional Development:

- Formal training in Visual C++ and Visual Basic; Collin County Community College
- Self taught in UNIX, Adobe Framemaker, and most Microsoft products.
- Formal training in ProE Mechanical; now self training in Alibre Mechanical.
- Informal training in Cadence Concept/Orcad and Allegro for PCB design.
- Various company courses plus self teaching in connector physics and signal integrity.
- Numerous company courses in team leadership and management.
- Easily capable of learning new applications as required; quickly.




-----------------------------------------------
Current Patents:
Patent # Title
-----------------------------------------------

6,384,325 Ventilation port and EMI wave-guide for electronic equipment [Low cost EMC for multi-
gigahertz Infiniband I/O modules]

6,313,523 IC die power connection using canted coil spring [Wireless computer interconnect]

6,312,973 IC die power connection using canted coil spring [Wireless computer interconnect]

5,930,822 Method and system for maintaining strong ordering in a coherent memory system [First
fully coherent crossbar interconnect between many (256) RISC CPUs]

5,845,071 Error containment cluster of nodes [First "highly available" UNIX system]

5,577,204 Parallel processing computer system interconnections utilizing unidirectional
communication links with separate request and response lines for direct communication or using
a crossbar switching device

5,560,027 Scalable parallel processing systems wherein each hyper-node has plural processing
modules interconnected by crossbar and each processing module has SCI circuitry for forming
multi-dimensional network with other hyper-nodes [First application of high speed, fully coherent,
serial interconnects

5,159,686 Multi-processor computer system having process-independent communication
registers addressing [first application of hardware based inter-process communication]

5,050,070 Multi-processor computer system having self-allocating processors [First and only
application of process context switching without OS intervention]

4,926,317 Hierarchical memory system with logical cache, physical cache, and address
translation unit for generating a sequence of physical addresses [First application of logic al
caching]

4,873,629 Instruction processing unit for computer

4,812,972 Microcode computer having dispatch and main control stores for storing the first and
the remaining microinstructions of machine instructions [Vector portion of first Mini-Super]

4,701,917 Diagnostic circuit [first application of serial scan for diagnostics]

4,665,506 Memory system with write protection 4,620,275 Computer system [first Mini-Super
Computer]

4,597,061 Memory system using pipeline circuitry for improved speed

4,528,666 Memory system with built in parity

Certifications
See above


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