BRIEF BIOGRAPHY


12 July, 2011

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I was born in 1958, living in Salt Lake City (UT), Pueblo (CO) and Indianapolis (IN) before graduating from Warren Central High School in 1976.

At the DeVry Chicago campus I lived in Chicago (IL) until I graduated from DeVry Institute of Technology in 1979.
At the Lokeren station I lived in Belgium from 1980-1982, while serving a mission for the LDS Church (Mormon), where I learned to speak Flemish (Dutch). This is what I taught.
I lived in Chicago (IL) from 1982-1988, working for Triangle Package Machinery Co, which built automated packaging machines. Here I learned how to program microprocessors in assembly language.
This was before the IBM-PC established the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) for personal computers, so Intel designed and sold their own Microprocessor Development Systems (MDS). Note the 8-inch floppy drives! I started out programming on one of these systems.
Diana and Me1986 HouseI purchased my first home in the Albany Park neighborhood, just south of the Kedzie stop on the Ravenswood  rapid transit line.
 I married the former Diana Lynn Demetropoulos in 1986.
My family We have two children: Steven, born in 1987, and Julie, born in 1989.
Me inside a Powderhorn tape library We moved to Colorado in 1988, to accept a job with  Seagate Technology.  We purchased a home in Longmont, Colorado.
Seven months later, Seagate closed their Colorado office, and in 1989 I started work at Storage Technology Corporation (where I worked on the Powderhorn tape library robotic software).
AIC-4411 die photograph AIC-5464 based disk drive I worked for almost six years at Adaptec, Inc., until it's semiconductor division was sold to STMicroelectronics in 1999.

I worked on a team designing integrated circuits for the disk drive industry.
 My team also buildt disk drive development boards and developed the servo firmware to run on them.

I personally designed the built-in ROM code for the AIC-4410, 4411, 4420, 4421, 5460, 5463, 5464, 5465 Hercules-2, Nova, and Nova-lite chips. These chips all have built-in Digital Signal Processor, RAM, Peripherals, Analog to Digital, Digital to Analog, and Embedded Servo logic. The 54xx series chips also have ATA-host, buffer, and disk controller logic.

Cabin, August, 1999No Cabin, June, 2000 In August of 1999 we purchased a primitive cabin in the mountains west of Loveland. The windows and doors were missing and boarded up, but it was well-built, and we loved the location, only 45 minutes from home. We replaced the windows and doors, moved our camping gear in.
On June 6-10, 2000 we spent our first summer vacation there.  Two days later, the Bobcat Gulch wildfire raced through the area, and our cabin burned to the ground. (The view on the right is a color photo, believe me!) We were heartbroken to find only a pile of ash and a few metal and glass artifacts after the fire. We barely had any time to enjoy it!


Bear Gulch cabin Due to the remote location of the cabin, we found it too difficult to rebuild. A year later we were able to purchase another piece of mountain land in nearby Bear Gulch, with two small sheds on it, and easier access.

The previous owner had installed a 12-volt lighting system in the two sheds. I have added a 5-watt solar panel and charge controller to keep the deep cycle battery charged. I plan to do more experiments with renewable energy here.

We started building a new cabin here, but our contractor never completed the job.  Take a lesson from us.  Withhold  final payment until all the work has been completed!

Eventually STM stopped supporting the 2nd-tier customers who needed firmware support.
Then I took a job working for Cornice, Inc., a startup which made small storage elements for consumer gadgets.  Here I developed the mask ROM for two different ARM9E-based chips.
I still have an working mp3 player containing a Cornice drive with a lot of fiirmware that I wrote.
Solid-state flash drive technology took over the low-capacity end of the storage market, and Cornice went out of business.
After the demise of Cornice, I found a good position developing drive firmware for Broadcom, Inc., which was entering the data storage market by developing their own drive controller.  This controller had a Cortex-R4 core.

Unfortunately, when they decided to cut costs a year later, this non-revenue-generating program was easy to kill--and that's what they did.
A friend helped me to get a new position at Marvell Semiconductors, Inc., which was entering the optical storage market by developing a controller-IC for Blu-Ray drives.  This was my first work on optical drives, which have interested me since the 80s.  The Marvell controller had two ARM9E cores with custom coprocessors.

During this time, my old STM team found work at Western Digital.

But after the economic trials of 2008, Marvell cut almost half of its optical drive team, including myself.
This time it was not so easy to find work. With a new administration passing agressive new regulations and ambitious new programs, not many people were hiring.
A friend helped me to get a contract job for a medical device manufacturer for three months this summer.
Then in the last quarter of 2009, things heated up. A recruiter from Minnesota called me after finding my profile on LinkedIn. The phone screening at PMC-Sierra went well, and so did the in-person interviews.
We prayerfully considered the employment offer, and decided to accept it. My team is writing firmware for a high-performance RAID controller, which fits into a PCI-express slot, and manages SAS and SATA drives.

To email me, use this address:

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