Analog Devices

Design Evaluation Engineer, Sep 1992 – Nov 1995

I was a member of the Design Support Group, which was responsible for the evaluation of all new IC designs in the Limerick facility.
I personally evaluated several ADC and DAC products.
I also helped develop a new bench-top mixed-signal tester using SHARC DSP and Xilinx Programmable Logic.

Details ...

The standard evaluation platform consisted of HP-9000 Series-300 controllers running HP-BASIC, with GPIB and GPIO cards. We later migrated to Sun workstations running LabVIEW.
I was directly involved in the following projects, among others:

Evaluation of a competitor’s 12-bit ADC;
AD7775A: Complete embedded servo front-end for disk drives;
AD771x: Family of 24-bit Sigma-Delta ADCs;
AD7849: 16-bit serial DAC.

The evaluation engineer’s role was mainly to verify device performance against specification. It also involved working closely with production test, quality assurance, product engineering, and applications engineering.
In my final year, I was one half of a two-man team assigned the task of developing a new bench-top mixed-signal tester for company-wide use. We used Analog DSP and Xilinx CPLD & FPGA technology to provide a reconfigurable solution, with both digital and analogue I/O capability. I presented a paper on this work at the Analog Devices’ Divisional Engineering Conference.

Training ...

Course	Notes
Digital Signal Processing
UNIX
Hypervision Visionary-2 Emission Microscopy
Designing for Noise
Hard Disk Drive Read Channels
TQM: 7-Step Problem Solving
C Programming
Schlumberger IDS5000 E-Beam Prober
FrameMaker
High-Speed Digital Design & Test
LabVIEW	National Instruments certified
Time Management
Microsoft Project
Logic Synthesis with Verilog	Synopsys certified
Verilog-XL	Cadence certified
Heat Transfer in Electronics
Transmission Line Fundamentals for High-Speed Digital Logic
Customer Focus