5668 Roane Drive, Oceanside,
California 92057
FRANK R. NICHOLS, SR.
frank@frankrnichols.com
SUMMARY: Principal
Engineer with extensive experience in product development, electrical hardware
& embedded firmware engineering.
·
Re-designed embedded firmware and hardware for
military radios used around the world.
·
Principal designer of telecom test equipment;
designing both hardware and firmware for multiple products used by AT&T,
TelMex, SBC Global and Bell South.
·
Sole
inventor for a unique Doppler Radar design that not only measures speed, but
also the distance to the target. Used by Toyota, Kentucky and Baxter Medical,
Los Angeles.
·
Principal
designer of a DSL Modem.
·
Patents
pending for embedded security device.
PROFICIENCIES:
Windows
2000, Windows XP, MS-DOS, Type 88-WPM, Unix, Linux, Cocoa, Mac OS-X, ANSI C,
ASM, C++, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, MS Project, SolidWorks, ProTel, ORCAD,
PADS, PSPICE, Altium, Zigbee, HomePlug (HPNA), ISM radio, mesh networks, aDSL,
TCP/IP, DDS (Direct Digital Synthesis), ADC, DAC.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Principal
Engineer .
Datron World
Communications, Inc., Vista, CA June
2005 to May 2010.
·
‘Key’
Sustaining engineer, supporting all products (VHF and HF military radios).
·
Re-designed
embedded firmware.
-
Coldfire,
MC68000, MC68HC711, Z8038018, Xilinx FPGAs.
-
Proprietary
RTOS, interrupt-driven work loops, and embedded MS-DOS.
-
Object-oriented,
ANSI C, and ASM.
·
Re-designed
existing hardware.
-
RF
phase detectors, 20W RF amplifier, 5W VHF amplifier, 125W antenna coupler.
·
Designed
new hardware and wrote firmware.
-
Rolling-code
encryption, remote-control keypad and display, data-logging modules.
-
Silabs
C8051F911 and C8051F121, Microchip PIC16F887 and PIC12F635.
·
Taught and mentored junior staff.
·
Wrote course materials teaching
theory of broadband impedance matching devices.
·
Identified ‘bugs’ in COTS
supplier's design, causing vendor re-design (improper bias of MOSFET gate
causing failure over temperature).
Principal
Engineer.
General Safety
Corporation, Oceanside, CA August
2002 to June 2005.
·
Original modulated Doppler Radar
design which output distance as well as velocity.
·
Complete
product definition, design, development, test, manufacture, marketing and sales
of K-band doppler radar products for traffic safety and sports
applications.
·
Analog
Devices' Blackfin - ADSP-BF533 for radar signals processing.
·
Microchip
- PIC 16F873 for system controller.
-
all
firmware in ANSI C.
·
Used SolidWorks for all cabinet
and front panel design work.
Principal
Engineer.
Excelsus Technologies, Division of Pulse Magnetics, Carlsbad, CA October 2000 to August 2002.
-
Designed low-cost frequency-agile test fixture,
suitable for export to our factory in China.
-
ATU-R
ADSL laptop modem plug-in module
(Alcatel chipset).
-
Handheld
end-to-end automated transmission test set for phone lines.
-
TDR
(Time Domain Reflectometer).
-
Reverse
TDR (using reverse-fourier transform to derive TDR information from frequency
domain measurements).
-
Automated 'technician' - voice-synthesized test
system allowing one technician to perform tests previously requiring two
technicians.
-
'The
ID'r' - Caller I.D. Test Set.
EDUCATION:
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Keywords:
Thermocouples,
MF/DTMF, 1/f noise limit, ferrite magnetics, Doppler Radar, Power management,
Thermal management, RTOS, Interrupt-driven, real time, embedded, object
oriented, kernel debugging, device drivers, I2C, SPI, serial async, serial
sync, UART, GPIB, DSP, CODEC, Power PC, HP
network analyzers, Tektronix 4GHz oscilloscopes, Agilent programmable waveform
generators, spectrum analyzers, netlisting, layout, and Gerber file generation.