CTO and CoFounder at Particles Plus

San Francisco, California, United States

Developed all the hardware and much of the firmware for a family of particle counting instrumentation.  These sophisticated products included two 32 bit controllers, 5+ 8 bit controllers, a large FPGA, a ton of interfaces (Ethernet wired and wireless, USB device and host, several RS-485 buses and RS-232), a graphics controller and touchscreen, flash storage and logging, intelligent battery and charger, closed-loop pump control, closed-loop laser control, sophisticated signal processing (in both hardware and firmware), remote bootloaders and remote diagnostics and logging.  Directed all engineering efforts, interfaced with large clients and distributors, wrote all the patents (a dozen or so issuing or issued), resolved manufacturing issues and trained key personnel.  Provided service support for units in the field to address issues as they arose.

Particles Plus

CTO and CoFounder

Developed high-energy Li-Ion battery packs for the electric vehicle, auxiliary power and grid storage industries.  Designed and manufactured over 1,000 high-energy packs (10-25 kWh) for electric vehicles for a large Chinese auto manufacturer.  These had 10-15 controllers, both internal and external networks, safety, state-of-charge, state-of-health, data-logging, etc.  Helped build up and provide engineering support two factories in China.  I did all the original hardware design and much of the firmware for these sophisticated battery packs.  I was also responsible for much of the design and development for products targeted at the telecom industry, auxiliary power, start-stop batteries and grid storage markets.

Octillion Power Systems

System Architect and CoFounder

Developed set of Point-of-Sale readers for cell-phone based transactions.  Developed all the hardware, firmware and configuration software for these, built prototypes, assembled, tested and deployed them.  Helped define back-end transaction architecture based on ISO-8583 protocol.  Added food order receipt and processing, printer interfaces and integrated modem.

Mobibucks

Engineering consulstant

Did all the hardware/firmware engineering work required to get funded.  Led the embedded engineering effort to design and implement a new electronic Credit Card that makes the magnetic stripe dynamic and optional LCD.  The product involved MEMS technology, an ASIC some aggressive power management and essentially creating an entire new class of products around a legacy technology.  The product was a very cost/performance-sensitive designed for large volumes 10M+ units/year.  Also, designed many control/test platforms and instrumentation in the pursuance of the card development efforts.  These included motorized readers/writers, battery testers, wear testers, button testers, plasma-treatment, etc.

QSecure

Director of Hardware Engineering, Systems Architect

Came onboard to offload engineering.  Did the hardware redesign of a handheld pulse-oximeter, this involved LCD, keypad, ARM-based controller w/ IrDA interface and interface to an in-house pulse-oximetry unit.  Interfaced with offshore manufacturing to resolve issues.  After that project I designed a power supply/battery charger board for their large pulse-oximeter.  Implemented both charging and fuel gauge algorithms on the controller as well as numerous fail-safes.  Implemented medical grade EMC mitigating enhancements and took the unit through emissions compliance.  Wrote and managed all of the FDA documentation for the board and performed FMEA analysis for the design.  Did all of the firmware, hardware, most of the PCB layout for this board.

Nellcor

Engineering consultant

Did all the hardware/firmware engineering work required to get funded.  Designed and implemented the electronics and firmware for a credit card reader add-on that allows new payment paradigms (RFID/IRDA/secure transactions) to be used with the existing reader install base.  The unit was designed for high volume production.  The board used 8051 and PIC flash based microprocessors.  This reader is the core of the new Express Pay, Pay Pass, Blink, etc. technology that is currently being deployed by various vendors nationwide.   After the initial few years effort with the company went back to address a long laundry list of issues that were plaguing their next generation units as they went to market.  Solved the bulk of those for them over a 3 month period.

ViVOtech, Inc.

Engineering Consultant

Worked on a number of projects for them spread-out over a decade (initially as Dionex).  Most projects ran for 3-6 months and added capacity to their engineering team to meet scheduling constraints.  All of the projects were hardware based designs or redesigns of existing boards used in instrumentation.

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Came on as a team member on a large project automating the utility monitoring for a large Italian utility company.   The system used Windows and an 80386ex based embedded board with Echelon network controller interface.  Wrote both sides of a custom European serial protocol for intelligent utility meters.  Protocol was written in C++ under WinNT and under the Target OS.  Implemented low-level serial drivers on the target and full X-Modem suite for both PC (multithreaded) and target platforms.  Troubleshot and debugged a number of intermittent driver issues in their custom kernel.

Echelon

Back when folks were still using dial-up connections for their online connections and checking email.  Notify created a set of products to use telephone company infrastructure to notify folks of pending voice-mail and email messages via a series of products.   These included small notepad holders with integrated LED that connected to the phone to detect the stutter dial-tone and indicate pending voice-mail to email servers that pushed messaging to local indicators to denote pending voice mail messages.  I designed the hardware and firmware for a number of very low-cost (i.e. everything on a very small micro with very few external components) to implement the consumer end indicators.   The local notepad device implemented FSK decoding, DTMF decoding, AGC front-end, speaker and line control/monitoring.  A wireless version allowed these units to be distributed throughout an office with a central unit serving phone/email status to each.  A full-service answering machine tied to the telecom company voice-mail system functioned like a regular answering machine allowing call screening, and remote message management.  This unit won first prize at CES ‘99 in the Telecom section.

Notify Technology

The Thin Film group of Varian Associates was purchased by Novellus.  I worked on a number of projects for Novellus over five years.  These were R&D projects to investigate various process technologies in order to determine viability of transforming these into commercial products.  These systems are large process tools typically involving high-vacuum, various gasses and large power supplies.   I implemented an Atomic Layer Chemical Vapor Deposition (ALCVD) system using Opto22 modules over Ethernet to interface to various analog/digital i/o and implemented serial drivers for manometers, gauges, and the RF generators.  I wrote the the C++ drivers for each and a C++ PC based GUI with total tool control and a sophisticated recipe editor.  I implemented several other tools in a similar fashion though each tool was different since as R&D projects they used what was at hand.  These projects included a Remote Plasma module and an EBeam module for Degas.

Novellus Systems

Worked for them when they were Laserscope. Took on a number of projects to offload their engineering team and bring in some external skills.  I worked as part of a team on a laser for Photo Dynamic Therapy (PDT) laser.  The control system was based on 80C188EB, C and a preemptive multitasking kernel.  I designed the electronics for the laser control board and did the firmware for this board.  I modified application level code from an existing laser product to fit the PDT application.  I also designed and implemented a laser calibration meter that could measure a very large dynamic range (milliwatts-kilowatts) of laser power.  The system had a sophisticated analog front end w/ a PIC microcontroller, on board DC-DC converter SPI peripherals and an RS-232 interface.

American Medical Systems, LLC

Technology Plus, Inc.

President

I was hired to address critical issues with the company’s blood freezers and thawers.  They’d been shipping their new products for 6 months and had a 100% failure and return rate in the field.  There were a host of issues, due largely to an inexperienced (at the time) hardware engineering team.  I redesigned nearly all the hardware taking pains to limit the changes so they could leverage existing firmware.  Within a few months all product issues were resolved and units were shipping again, problem-free.   After this effort I worked on a new product to separate Fibrin from Plasma.  They had been working on in development for 6 months and had promised a demo to a client the following week.  Though they had 6 months of mechanical design logged (with 3 engineers and a load of molded parts), they had no hardware or firmware at all (the inside of the instrument was empty).  I loaded up my car with equipment from my home-office and in 5 days (4 of them with no sleep) developed all the electronics and firmware to implement a working instrument that they were able to demonstrate successfully to their investor.  The product included an LCD interface, motor interfaces, valves, refrigeration, heaters, pumps, keypads, communications, etc.

Thermogenesis

The thin-film group for Varian Associates developed semiconductor process equipment.  They were purchased in 1997 by Novellus and I went on to continue working with that group and other groups at Novellus after the sale.   For Varian I was the only hardware, firmware, software engineer working on a number of R&D projects.  The projects typically cobbled together existing sub-systems into at test setup to evaluate some particular process technology.   The Directional Physical Vapor Deposition (DPVD) project involved a VME platform with OS-9 operating system running under Brooks Automation’s PAL environment.   I wrote the control software for this system and interfaced to an external TCP/IP module.  I also interfaced an RF power supply by creating a custom PCB and firmware to integrate into the control system and resolve a number of issues we were having getting the power supply to integrated reliably.

Varian Semiconductor

Worked for them as the only firmware engineer on a Point-of-inflection-thermometry (POINT) project.  The instrument provided remote temperature sensing for a wafer placed inside a Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) furnace.  The instrument did spectroscopic analysis of the wafer through an optical port using the black-body radiation curve and some sophisticated filtering to arrive at the wafer temperature.  The hardware was built with off-the-shelf components and a pre-existing amplifier board.  I did a little hardware but wrote all of the firmware for this project.  Since we were using pre-existing hardware that had very poor library or driver support I did pretty much everything from the ground up, which included: a multitasking kernel, porting and writing a sophisticated graphics interface for a custom LCD, closed-loop motor controller driver (for the spectrometer), data-acquisition, signal analysis, calibration, printer interface, data export.   The product was well received and won a Top 100 IR&D award in ‘94.

Intevac

Asyst had just landed a contract to automate wafer handling the largest (at the time) wafer fab in the world (TSMC).  They had custom designed robots and micro-enclosures (to keep the wafers clean) but needed to network all of these robots and interface them to the wafer fab mainframe.  I created bootloaders for the robots and a means of downloading code to each remotely from the mainframe as well as a network to interconnect them all and the protocol to interface to the wafer fab process control system and to also multiplex terminal sessions over that same link, so operators could interface to the mainframe over that same link.  The project used off-the-shelf hardware (high-speed at the time) RS-485 boards and a DECNET (Ethernet) interface.   I did the bulk of the work on this project, bringing on an additional engineer for some of the work.  The project was installed and went online in the fab.

Asyst Technologies

Started Lighthouse Associates with a group of engineers.  The company was an engineering firm, specializing in software, firmware, and hardware design and manufacturing.  The company went on to become Lighthouse Worldwide systems that manufactures and sells products for the cleanroom industry.  Designed a number of data collection and control products to interface with the company’s feature rich Facility Monitoring Systems.  Managed the engineering effort and engineering team, designed all the hardware and the firmware, was the technical interface with clients logging for very large installations.

Lighthouse Worldwide Solutions

VP Engineering, CoFounder

Joined a small team working on a classified black project to develop a next generation Radar Warning Receiver.  The project used a real-time multi-processor embedded system with sophisticated signal processing, vector graphic displays, speech synthesis, MIL-STD 1553 bus.  I wrote firmware for this project (C, Ada and assembly language) and for supporting simulations.

David Pariseau

David Pariseau