Resume for Frederick Kilner

by Frederick Kilner
(Los Altos, CA, USA)

I've been in Japan twice. Once as an English Tutor at the two week English Academy at the Osaka YMCA in 1989. After that job I went over to Toyama and they put me on TV in Samurai armor. Next time was 4 years ago for a week in Tokyo coming back from 3 months in China.

I received an AA in Japanese before receiving my degree in Computer Engineering. I would like to spend more time in Japan. Below is my Computer Engineering job resume.


Frederick Kilner (US Citizen)
MS Computer Engineering UC Santa Cruz 1998
650-492-1192 cell / message
fkilner@alumni.cse.ucsc.edu
http://alumni.cse.ucsc.edu/~fkilner
185 Loucks Ave; Los Altos, CA 94022
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Objective:
Logic verification and bringup. Write firmware to bringup hardware and test.
Write validation test code in C, C++, TCL or other language.
Work with system firmware and verilog or VHDL to add features or debug.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Work Experience:

7/2010 - to present Took 4 classes at UCSC Extension:
1. design Simulation with System Verilog
2. System Verilog Assertions
3. Designing Xilinx CPLDs and FPGA : Made a small version of space invaders
on a FPGA evaluation board.
4. Introduction ASIC Physical Design with Synopsys IC Compiler.
5. Took 4 quarters of biology at a local community college since Biology
is becoming more programmable every year.
6. Started learning JAVA and my first program, Space Invaders, is coming
along nicely. Plan is to learn to write Android(based on JAVA) apps
7. Also working with Altera's Quartus FPGA design suite. Modifying Apple ][
emulator written in VHDL.

8/2007 - 6/2010 Redback Networks, San Jose, CA
Writing manufacturing test scripts for contract manufacturers to use on
new boards. Help bring up and debug new boards. Visit contract manufacturers
in San Jose, Fremont, and Mexico and show them how to run tests and help with
board debug.

2/2005 - 12/2006 Tharas Systems Inc., Santa Clara, CA
Software and Hardware Verification Engineer
Wrote validation code at Tharas for its main board, the fourth-generation
hardware accelerator. Wrote testing code in TCL and C. Setup the board, ran
payloads through the data paths, and checked results. Found and documented
numerous errors involving manufacturing flaws, timing problems, reset problems,
and rocket I/O link problems. My work contributed to the eventual successful
bringup of the board. Developed many tests for manufacturing and lab use, as
well as some diagnostics for running test clusters. I'd like another job like
this.

7/2004 NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA
Engineering Consultant
Consulted on the Winkler Project - a precision gamma ray detector that was
being refurbished at NASA Ames. Read and disassembled old 8085a firmware.
Found an 8085 disassembler, modified it to run under Linux, and used my EPROM
Programmer/Reader.

11/2001-3/2003 Rasvia Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Software / Firmware Engineer, Storage Array Development
Performed many embedded software tasks as part of the development of the
mid-range fibre-channel RAID storage array. Wrote firmware for the cache-board
that ran on the MIPs core of an enclosure management chip (Vitesse VSC120).
Configured various ports and pins, including an FC-AL port, I2C ports,
interrupts, a serial port, and GPIO pins connected to an FPGA and a memory
chip. Used I2C chips and the VSC7147 to run hardware bypass tests. Upgraded
the I2C driver on the controller boards. Wrote code to validate the
fibre-channel loop (by issuing LIP's) and communicate the state from the cache
board to the controller. Programmed the FPGA. Optimized the code for speed.
Wrote a wrapper to compress the code so that two copies could be stored. Found
hardware bugs involving the board configuration and connections.

4/2000-11/2001 Sun Microsystems Network Storage, Newark, CA
Software Engineer, Storage Arrays
Worked with F-code (a version of Forth) firmware on a low-end storage
array being developed. The array used a Sun motherboard and a custom board
with a PCI bridge and PCI to IDE chips along with IDE drives. Wrote functions
to probe the I2C and PCI buses. Developed a diagnostic program in Openboot to
probe the custom hardware. Wrote a menu to call this program. Discovered
existing bugs in Openboot involving the I2C and PCI drivers. Used
cscope and scripts to trace through the Openboot code to find.
Also did some software debug for the T3 mid-range storage array.
Changed the build system to cross-compile the PowerPC code with gcc
because it was better at detecting bugs than the PSOS compiler.

7/1998-8/1999 Cyclonics Inc., Fremont, CA
Hardware and Software Engineer
Performed logic-design and firmware design tasks as part of the product
development. Worked with verilog and firmware on a project reverse
engineering Matsushita's DVD player chipset. On that project a board with
several Altera FPGA's was wired to a DVD player. It was setup so it could

be selected which Matsushita chips could be bypassed by our logic in FPGAs.

I modified the player's firmware so the state of machine could be monitored
by using its remote control and on screen display(OSD). With the remote
several different components could be selected to be monitored. I used an ICE
which emulated the Fujitsu microcontroller. The MPEG chip had several error
counting registers which were important to monitor. I found many errors such as
problems passing data between two clocks, problems at some block numbers.
When there were problems playing audio CD's I went through the source verilog
and found that head and tail pointers of the input buffer could pass each other
and even flip left and right audio channels.

That was a very fun job and I would like to work with verilog, now system
verilog, and help design or debug logic again.

--------------------------------------------------
Previous Experiences and Internships

6/1997-9/1997 - NTT in Palo Alto:
I wrote a cgi program which would call some network monitoring tools.
I made a web page where tools and times could be selected to monitor network
traffic. Data from, the tools were written to files and could be graphed with
gnuplot. Also we had a-lot of lunch time soccer games. That was a summer job
and I returned to UCSC.

4/1996-9/1996 - Lockheed Martin:
Wrote some passes of a C-like compiler. A satellite was being designed to
monitor the composition of the Earth's atmosphere at various altitudes.
Software in this Satellite would run in a C-like language called Sail.
I wrote some passes for that compiler using Borland Turbo C++ before
returning to UCSC.

6/1995-9/1995 - Sun Microsystems:
I worked one summer at Sun writing some code to parse verilog.

3/1990-9/1990 - Straindyne Engineering:
I calibrated and assembled strain gauges in devices for industrial and
medical applications.

7/1989-8/1989 - Osaka YMCA:
One month job in Japan as an English tutor.

9/1985-6/1986 - NASA Ames Research Center:
Programmed FORTRAN mainly on a VAX 11/780 for a few researchers. The Vax
replaced a PDP shortly after I went there and Terak machines used as terminals
were replaced by PC's. I wrote code to process some data from a spectrograph
and used a graphics package called mongo to plot it. Also ran some computing
jobs on a Cray machine.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Education

6/2011 - Foothill College: AS in Biology
9/2010-4/2011 - Took 4 courses at UCSC Extension. Two system verilog courses
and one Xilinx FPGA and on Synopsys ICC (IC Compiler).
I can bring my Nexsys2 Xilinx FPGA board plug it into a VGA
monitor and shoot space invaders.
9/1996-6/1998 - UC Santa Cruz: MS Computer engineering.
9/1993-6/1995 - UC Santa Cruz: BS Computer engineering with highest honors.
6/2010-3/2011 - Taking some biology classes.
3/1987-6/1991 - Foothill College: AA in Japanese.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Projects at UCSC and Cyclonics Inc.

Devices Designed:
At Cyclonicsinc: Audio Detect Chip - Designed the algorithm and implemented
all the logic in verilog for a chip which listens for an audio search pattern
and when detected plays some music.

At UCSC: Multiplier and other devices - Used a freeware floor plan editor
called magic. Designed at floor-plan and transistor level.

At UCSC: Software compiler project - Used bison and flex to write some
passes of a C-like compiler and generate sparc assembly.

At UCSC: RISC microprocessor - Used Altera's maxplus2 and wrote in AHDL a
verilog like language. The logic was loaded into several Altera FPGAs on a
board plugged into a PC's ISA bus. It worked well and had some forwarding.

At UCSC: Micro mouse - When placed in a maze it could navigate using IR-LEDs
and Sensors. Was based on a 68HC11 microcontroller and the code fit in 512
bytes of EEPROM. It was the smoothest mouse and could run the longest and
the only one which used 4 batteries instead of 8 for its motors and used
transistors instead of op amps to amplify the sensor signals. Of the about
10 mice this one was one of two which worked good and never knocked walls over.

At UCSC: Xilinx FPGA Maze solver - On a UCSC custom board called borg there
were 4 Xilinx FPGAs and some memory. The maze was in a PC and the board
could ask to see what walls were around at its current position. It would
explore the maze then solve it. I used Xilinx's workview, xact, and other
logic synthesis tools.

At UCSC: Music synthesizer - Interrupt driven 8 bit DAC synthesizer based
on a 68008 and various logic chips. Used a 68681 DUART so a RS-232 port
from a terminal could control it.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------