Electronic circuit design, PCB layout, system engineering - San Diego - c-lab


	Resume, HTML (619) 460-4760 Bruce Brentlinger www.c-lab.com 1991 - 2012 c-lab, San Diego CA Projects are listed in rough reverse chronological order. Most of the designs involved a team of other engineers and scientists of various disciplines. The last sentence of each listing describes the level of involvement in each individual project. Designed a card for a mobile wireless traffic monitoring system that resided on a school bus. The system used digital video cameras inside the bus to monitor the children and high resolution digital cameras outside the bus to monitor school bus stop-arm traffic violations when the school bus was stopped and children were embarking or disembarking the bus. Traffic violations and GPS location were recorded and sent over wireless to a private web server where law enforcement officers reviewed the violations, read the license plates and wrote tickets. The card controlled power distribution for a portable computer system with power MOSFETs; provided battery backup power for the system when the bus engine was stopped or bus battery went too low; had a total system sleep power draw of under 120nA while bus was parked; controlled a cooling fan; monitored case temperature and cooling fan speed; turned system power on and off at regular intervals for wireless data transmission uploads; monitored /maintained/charged a small sealed lead acid backup battery; monitored bus signal lights, stop arm, ignition, and battery voltages; communicated with the computer system over a serial link; and had extensive surge and ESD protection. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, block diagrams, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, firmware, test and integration. Designed a 150 Watt per channel Ultrasonic Sound Stereo Amplifier card for directional sound audio applications. Directional audio uses ultrasound as a carrier to transmit audio that is demodulated by the air it is traveling through. The card used a high frequency Class-D power amplifier that was impedance matched to proprietary sound emitters. It had a software controlled preamplifier with automatic gain control, and a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) for amplitude modulation and signal conditioning. An auxiliary micro-controller (MCU) was used for control/status of the DSP, temperature monitoring, cooling fan speed control and fan speed monitoring, carrier level detection, input level detection, soft start-up, power amplifier monitoring/control, and user input status/control panel. Involved concept development, consulting, electronic circuit design, system engineering, block diagrams, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, firmware, software engineering, test and integration. Designed several high-power infrared and visible LED pulsed flash illuminators for outdoor photo capture used in transportation monitoring systems. The design features stuck-on LED protection, low average power consumption, handles peak surge currents of 100A, and has an adjustable radiation pattern. Designed several baseband signal conditioning and controller cards for a gigabit wireless radio link in the E-band frequency spectrum (71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz). I was part of a team responsible for the first few successful prototypes that helped secure additional funding through to the first production run. The card retimed and encoded/decoded signals from the IF modem and routed it to an SFP (fiber or copper) network. It managed variable bit rates from 125Mbps to 2.7Gbps; monitored temperatures in the enclosure; monitored and adjusted transmit power, a built in BERT, and hosted another plug in card for web based setup, monitoring, and control. It used a mix of CML and PECL logic, I2C, SPI, UART, ADCs, DACs, comparators, low noise power distribution, and optically isolated I/O. I am a co-inventor of an antenna alignment algorithm patent for this product. Designed an ultra capacitor test card and test system for 100% test quality control and statistical monitoring in a rugged industrial production line. The system can test 32 capacitors at one time in less than 48 seconds. The results are sent to a PC for real time analysis of the production line flow and stored in a Windows database application. It identifies short circuit and open circuit capacitors as well as those capacitors that fall below certain minimum requirements for capacitance, equivalent series resistance (ESR) and leakage. Plots of data are available as characteristic curves for each capacitor (individually or 32 combined), normal distribution curve for all tests, power supply voltage monitoring, and temperature monitoring. The card features measurement accuracy of 0.000125V; handles peak surge currents of 40A; is equipped with 16 bit self-calibrating ADCs; small high quality MOSFETs; a RISC micro-controller, and capacitive touch button manual control. I am a co-inventor of a capacitor-screening patent for this test system. Modified existing Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) that charged capacitors to discharge them. The tester tower had eight levels; each level tested 256 10 Farad capacitors. Re-routed power, modified circuit cards, corrected the control panel to add the discharge feature and notify the user of charging status. Involved reverse engineering, redesign and some electronic circuit design. Designed a card to combine two 5 Farad ultracapacitors into one package (PC5-5) with integral active balancing circuit. Then combined these cards into a panel of 195 cards with stiffener for mass production. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Developed a Mobile Visibility Transmissometer (MVT) test instrument for measuring laser performance at three different wavelengths in the field. Designed a card to drive the lasers and a card to receive the laser transmission. The receiver used an innovative signal magnification circuit that measured small variations in signal strength. The system features uniform laser output over time using a feedback control circuit, thermoelectric cooler controls for laser cooling; heater controls for coping with outdoor environmental conditions; data collection via a programmable data logger; wireless data communication via cellular telephone. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, block diagrams, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, cabling, harness, interconnects, test and integration. Developed a general-purpose smart-card reader circuit card. Featuring an Atmel AT91 ARM Thumb microcontroller; universal serial bus (USB); designed in four 1.1" square cuttable and stackable sections; copper trace antenna embedded in circuit card; radio frequency and microcontroller circuits on the same card. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed two cards for a 48-channel Automated Accelerated Characterization Test Station (AACTS) that distributed power and signals for low noise measurement over tri-axial controlled-impedance paths embedded in the circuit card. The station tested RF semiconductors such as discrete (MESFETs, HBTs, Diodes, etc.), monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs), hybrid microwave integrated circuits (HMICs) at temperatures up to 250 degrees C. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, block diagrams, schematics and printed circuit card layout. Developed an interface card for a Free Space Optical (FSO) communications system based on Long Wave Infra-Red (LWIR) all-weather optical wireless (AOW) technology. Featuring multimode 1300nm fiber-optic or copper inputs and conversion of these inputs to a level (Emitter Coupled Logic [ECL] or Positive-referenced ECL [PECL]) compatible with a Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) input; temperature sensing and control of laser temperature using thermoelectric coolers; control of laser power, bias, and modulation; conversion of outputs from a proprietary laser detector to multimode 1300nm fiber-optic or copper outputs; high-gain automatic gain control (AGC) amplification, limiting or direct connection of the detector signal; signal processing of the detector signal using adaptive clock and data recovery with a programmable continuous non-return-to-zero (NRZ) frequency coverage from 10 megabits per second to 2.7 Gigabits per second; continuous non-invasive bit error rate monitoring; communication protocol independent - gigabit Ethernet, Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) Optical Carrier (OC) OC-1 (51.84Mbps) /OC-3 (155.52Mbps) /OC-12 (622.08Mbps) /OC-48 (2.488Gbps); in-circuit programmable microcontroller; test mode for alignment; user control panel interface with buttons and 8-character dot matrix alphanumeric programmable display. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, block diagrams, schematics, printed circuit card layout, firmware, cabling, harness, interconnects, test and integration. Developed access control smart-card reader circuit cards for a wall mount application to control building access. Featuring an Atmel AT91 ARM Thumb microcontroller; optically isolated Wiegand interface; universal serial bus (USB); Ethernet; copper trace antenna embedded in circuit card; radio frequency and microcontroller circuits on the same card. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Developed and built an over-voltage protection card that protected Ultracapacitor testers from the test power supply. It could handle a 20A load and had a fully adjustable trip point. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, schematics, test and integration. Designed a power backplane for a front replaceable modular DC (direct current) 300-watt power supply used in a Z-ATX rugged military computer workstation. Involved some electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed a backplane for the TranzPak 7 hot-pluggable IDE hard drive used in a Z-ATX rugged military computer workstation. Involved some electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed a flexible circuit for use inside a TranzPak 7 hot-pluggable IDE hard drive used in rugged military computer workstations. Involved some electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Developed concept and designed five cards (backplane, motherboard docking card, front panel, motherboard I/O, and rear I/O panel), for a Z-MPU rugged high performance military multi-processor computer system. Featuring hot-swappable environmentally Sealed Computer Modules (SCM) and TranzPak 7 disk modules; multiple platforms (Intel, Sun, IDE, SCSI) and multiple operating systems can run together simultaneously; access to Shared Peripheral Clusters through a matrix-switched array of USB peripherals that can be dynamically switched to any SCM; an embedded processor for monitoring system health and watch-dog activity. Involved concept development, electronic design, system engineering, block diagrams, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Investigated and evaluated new lasers, detectors, modulators and electronic devices; generated characteristic curves, eye diagrams, and researched the feasibility of electronic circuit designs to incorporate these new devices into an all-weather optical wireless (AOW) communications system. Designed electronic related portions of lab setups for research and demonstrations that required Bit Error Rate Testers (BERT), Digital Phosphor Oscilloscopes (DPOs), TEC (thermoelectric cooler) controllers, acousto-optic modulators and drivers, thermal imaging equipment, CO2 lasers, Quantum Cascade Lasers (QCL), Helium-Neon lasers, and other types of lasers, proprietary detectors, optical tables, various lenses, reflectors, beam splitters, and optical power meters. Set up and integrated electronic and optical equipment; directed lab personnel, performed optical alignments (visible and invisible), and verified performance with comparison to competitors equipment. Involved concept development, consulting, reverse engineering, redesign, electronic circuit design, system engineering, block diagrams, cabling, harness, interconnects, test and integration. Developed an access control smart card reader concept for a wall mount application to control building access. Featuring a MachZ (x86 system-on-a-chip) microprocessor; 16Mb DRAM; 16Mb Flash; Ethernet interface; optically isolated inputs/outputs for door control, motion detectors, door switches; several types of serial interfaces. Involved concept development, collaborative electronic circuit design and block diagrams. Developed access control smart-card reader circuit cards for a wall mount application to control building access. Featuring an MCORE 2107 microcontroller; optically isolated outputs, copper trace antenna embedded in circuit card; radio frequency and microcontroller circuits on the same card. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Wrote device drivers for a real-time broadcast-quality digital video over Internet protocol (IP) gateway. Based on the Intel strong-arm 1200/PCI processor, it involved C programming of device drivers for the Jam Player - for JTAG (Joint Test Action Group) programming of FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays); buttons; LCD; video, sound, and Inter-IC (I2C) two-wire serial bus chips. Involved firmware, test and integration. Designed a card to combine two 5 Farad ultracapacitors into one package. Then combined these cards into a panel of 195 cards with stiffener for mass production. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed multi-function 20 cell 4 Farad ultracapacitor tester with a 5A peak discharge per cell (100A fully loaded). It is capable of manual (pushbutton) or programmable automatic charge/discharge cycling and automatic leakage testing through a programmable data logger. It also has the flexibility to be connected to a Bitrode cell tester. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, block diagrams, schematics and printed circuit card layout. Designed a backplane for the TranzPak 7 hot-pluggable IDE hard drive used in a Zxi rugged rack mount military computer workstation. Involved some electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed a low profile Bus Master Ultra DMA PCI to IDE adapter card for use in rugged military computer workstations. Involved electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed the front panel card for a real-time broadcast-quality digital video over Internet protocol (IP) gateway. Involved electronic circuit design, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, firmware, test and integration. Reduced size and optimized design of a smart card reader connectable to the Internet via a serial connection to a personal computer. Featuring copper trace antenna embedded in circuit card; 9V battery powered; radio frequency and microcontroller circuits on the same card. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card layout. Designed a portable smart-card reader circuit card that plugged into a Handspring Visor springboard expansion slot. Featuring 16Mb Flash memory; AAA battery power; copper trace antenna embedded in circuit card; radio frequency and microcontroller circuits on the same card. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card layout. Developed concept for an embedded system in a Local Multipoint Distribution Services (LMDS broadband wireless 24/28GHz) network transceiver. The design involved control and monitoring of proprietary monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs); telemetry modulator/demodulator and switch; in-circuit programming, diagnostics and test; power supply and power distribution. Also worked on an up/down converter for a cable modem demonstration requiring some microwave design in the 900MHz range. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering and block diagrams. Designed packaging and layout of fiber-optic based triggering instruments for disarming nuclear warheads. Controlled the impedance using micro-strip and other high-speed digital design methods. Designed sheet metal enclosures, front and rear panels, silkscreen and finish. Handled enclosure fabrication, printed circuit card (PCB) fabrication, and final assembly. Delivered 12-channel and 4-channel rack mount units and one tabletop unit completely assembled and ready to use. Involved some electronic circuit design, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout and mechanical engineering. Developed charge balancing cards for 2700 Farad capacitors used in multiple cell banks for high current powercache applications. Balancing was user enabled with a very low quiescent current of 26uA and a maximum drive current of .5A. Typical units provided 1.6KWm to 2.3KWm (Kilo-Watt-minutes) of power for telecom, medical, industrial and other industries that require high reliability bridge power. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, test and integration. Designed a multi-function 78 cell tester for stacked 10 Farad ultracapacitors (PC10). It is capable of manual (pushbutton) or automatic operation through a programmable data logger; charge/discharge cycling; automatic leakage testing; and user selectable parallel or series modes. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, block diagrams, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed a 256 cell 10 Farad ultracapacitor (PC10) tester card that resided in 8 rack pneumatic powered tester. The 16" by 18" card was capable of manual or automatic leakage testing of capacitors through a PC based data acquisition system. Involved electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed two cards that simulated an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for a contactless smart card with an embedded chip and antenna that communicates via radio frequency with special readers at the point of entry into transit fare gates, ticket vending machines (AVM), parking systems, and potentially, building doors and airport boarding gates. Features a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA); design of a custom enclosure with power supply. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout and mechanical engineering. Designed three 26 cell over voltage protection and balancing cards for 2700 Farad ultracapacitors (PC2500). Two of which were bus cards that routed the signals from the cells. Involved reverse engineering, redesign, electronic design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed a smart card reader connectable to the Internet via a serial connection to a personal computer. Featuring copper trace antenna embedded in circuit card; 9V battery powered; radio frequency and microcontroller circuits on the same card. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed a pair of optical sensor cards (transmit and receive) for sensing coins falling through a return chute. Featuring closed-loop feedback for self-adjustment of optical output to compensate for aging, dirt build up and extend the life of components. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, cabling, harness, interconnects, test and integration. Developed an over discharge protection circuit and a constant current/voltage pulse width modulated 3A battery charger for a sealed lead acid battery back up. And integrated it into a microcontroller based alarm module. Involved electronic circuit design, collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics, test and integration. Designed a card that simulated an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for a contactless smart card with an embedded chip and antenna that communicates via radio frequency with special readers at the point of entry into transit fare gates, ticket vending machines (AVM), parking systems, and potentially, building doors and airport boarding gates. Featuring generic array logic (GAL) and discrete logic components; design of a custom carrying case/enclosure with power supply, internal and external cabling. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, firmware, cabling, harness, interconnects and mechanical engineering. Designed a card to replace an obsolete 50 Volt bi-polar full bridge motor driver. Featuring discrete power Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFETs) controlled by programmable logic with current sense control inputs for over current protection, and a very compact 1.25-inch by .6-inch printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Involved electronic circuit design, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, firmware, test and integration. Designed a card for controlling movement in a ticket transport mechanism. Included motor drivers, solenoid drivers, and optical sensor inputs. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, cabling, harness, interconnects, test and integration. Designed four cards for various automatic fare collection (AFC) machines including a card that processed turnstile gate sensor inputs using a 32 bit microcontroller, and 24 Volt optically isolated inputs; a power distribution card for gates; a power failure monitor; and redesigned a solenoid and sensor interface card. Involved collaborative electronic design, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, test and integration. Designed I/O expansion cards for an automatic ticket vending machine (AVM). Featuring computer controlled voice output, audio amplifiers, cascaded Direct Audio Storage Technology (DAST) or a speech synthesizer, programmable logic, and multiple serial channels. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, test and integration. Redesigned a magnetic stripe ticket reader interface card for an automatic ticket vending machine (AVM) and designed a microcontroller based hopper security module. Involved collaborative electronic circuit design, schematics and printed circuit card layout. Designed seven cards for various automatic fare collection (AFC) machines including a switch interface; a UPS interface that sends a power fail signal from an uninterruptible power supply to a serial port; an aisle sensor pulse modulator/driver; a serial adapter for a voice module; extender cards for maintenance; and a smart card target interface. Involved schematics and printed circuit card (PCB) layout. Designed several cards for industrial ultraviolet water disinfection machines. Including a programmable logic controlled 28-lamp system activity monitor featuring high voltage current sensing, lamp life timer, lamp failure alarms, and AC to DC power supply. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, schematics, printed circuit card (PCB) layout, firmware, test and integration. Designed a 254nm light-sensing unit to monitor radiation levels; and redesigned an electronic ballast resulting in 23% higher output while lowering power input by 15%. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design and schematics. 1989 - 1991 International Lottery & Totalizator Systems, Carlsbad CA These projects were for computerized ticket processing systems for the gaming and wagering industry. An essential part of these systems were digital communications among microprocessor based ticketing machines, communication controllers that concentrated data, and mainframe computer systems. (A totalizator is a machine that registers bets and computes the odds & payoffs for pari-mutuel betting.) Designed a dual channel synchronous differential controller for the PC/AT-Bus with daisy chain, multi-drop and arbitration sections. This lowered production costs and increased message handling capabilities. Involved system engineering. Wrote software to verify design, to test, and to program boards in the production area. This enabled programmers to concentrate on higher level application software. Involved software engineering, test and integration. 1986 - 1989 Logicon, San Diego CA The projects here were for military training simulators of various types. The two larger projects were a communications interface for stimulating aircraft consoles and an air traffic control tower trainer. This equipment met military specifications. Designed a color recognition circuit for allowing a computer to sense the color of light emitted from an air traffic control light gun. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, block diagrams and schematics. Designed a computer-controlled audio communication system with voice recognition and voice synthesis, telephone (Kentrox) interface, radio transceiver simulation and a data Input/Output subsystem. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, block diagrams, schematics, cabling, harness and interconnects. Developed multi-user Computer Aided Design application software in C for use on a network of SUN-3 workstations running UNIX. Involved concept development, system engineering, block diagrams, software engineering, test and integration. Worked on proposal teams, advising, costing, and writing technical portions of proposals. Involved concept development, system engineering and block diagrams. 1984 - 1985 Cubic Corporation, San Diego CA This was for an Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) radar simulator project. This equipment met military specifications. Designed an audio communication card using audio amplifier ICs, filters, and mixing circuits. Multi-purpose card had three different functions depending on how the card was populated. This resulted in a 66% savings in design, documentation, and production costs. Involved concept development, electronic circuit design, system engineering, block diagrams, schematics, cabling, harness, interconnects, test and integration. 1983 Education Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester NY - BSEE Skills Summary Programming and Software: C++, C, assembly language, database, html, various windows and unix/linux applications Computer Aided Design: Schematic Capture, printed circuit card (PCB) Layout (IPC Certified), SPICE, Mechanical design, PLDs (OrCAD, Altium/Protel, PadsPCB, Solidworks, AutoCAD, and more) Management: Employees, Subcontracts, Projects, Planning: Tasks (WBS), Budgets (M&M), Schedules (Pert) Small Business: Accounting, Taxes, Finance, and Marketing. View resume, HTML only
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