Thomas L. Carter
PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY
Wide ranging professional experience in electrical design engineering, mostly at the printed circuit board level. Extremely versatile and innovative electrical design skills covering power, photonic, RF, analog and digital areas. Excellent at resolving very complex and challenging technical issues. Dedicated to production of high quality products on schedule at lowest cost. Experience in both R&D and manufacturing environments. Experience in printed circuit board electromagnetic and signal integrity issues. Experienced in designing for cost, manufacturability, and test.
OBJECTIVE
A hardware design or development position which specializes in analog, power management, RF, high-speed digital, or optical applications. Available for smaller consulting jobs.
EXPERIENCE
Digital Safety Technologies, (Morrisville, NC) May 2008 – Present
Hardware Design Engineer
Worked with a small team to develop hardware for an automotive public safety DVR system. This product was taken from conceptual specifications through a fully qualified manufacturing package. Responsible for power management, video, audio, control, and performance monitoring subsystems. Performed component selection, circuit design, layout, validation, and manufacturing start up for this product. Concurrently supported manufacture of a legacy product. Made numerous design changes to improve manufacturing yield, reliability, and replace obsolete components which lead to a 60% reduction in RMAs. Implemented a novel vibration hardening technique using a flexible PC board. Performed design verification and accelerated life testing on these design changes.
Plexus Technology Group, (Raleigh, NC) September 2007 – May 2008
Analog Design Engineer
Responsible for sensors, ultrasonic transducer drive circuitry, and power management for a battery powered drug delivery system. Developed innovative methods for piezoelectric transducer performance monitoring and airflow measurement. Minimized cost while assuring reliability suitable for a medical device. Designed test equipment modifications to perform specialized automated measurements.
Independent Consultant, (Fuquay Varina, NC) October 2004 - Present
Numerous projects including:
ESG (Gaithersburg, MD) WiMax System for International Client
Resolved numerous design issues related to power distribution, clocking, telemetry, and connectivity for a WiMax network deployed in Brazil.
Adapticom (Raleigh, NC) RF Modem for Point to Point Microwave Data Link
Responsible the redesign of mixed-signal, analog, and power portions of an RF modem. Implemented design changes to reduce cost and number of versions of an RF modem board. used in a point-to-point microwave link system.
Allied Telesyn Networks, (Raleigh, NC) February 2002 – October 2004
Hardware Development Engineer
Responsible for high-speed optical uplink boards operating at 1.25, 3.125 and 10.3 GBPS. These boards included serial data links up to 10.3 GBPS over conventional PC board material. Evaluated chip sets for clock recovery, serialization/deserialization, crosspoint switching, and distributed power. Performed qualification testing of SFP and XFP standard optical transceiver modules to assure compliance to optical and electrical specifications over the full industrial temperature range. Evaluated WDM Transceivers and passive optics for use in a CWDM loop network. Worked with board layout subcontractors to incorporate advanced technologies to improve data reflection, noise, and EMC performance.
Lucent Technologies, (Raleigh, NC) October 2000 – October 2001
Member of Technical Staff
Hardware designer for a Metro DWDM system. Evaluated chip sets for clock recovery, clock jitter reduction, serialization/deserialization, forward error correction, and clock frequency scaling. Tested tunable lasers and photodetectors. Investigated signal integrity issues associated with transmitting clock and data at GHz rates between adjacent circuit boards and modules. Evaluated electromagnetic compatibility issues on a smaller scale metro system. Recommended board layout and shielding changes which contributed to this system passing EMC compliance tests.
General Dynamics Advanced Technology Systems, (Greensboro, NC)
October 1997 – October 2000
Principal Engineer
RF designer on an R&D program to develop an advanced coherent optical instrumentation system for undersea acoustic sensors. Responsible for optical to electrical conversion, RF processing, baseband processing, and analog to digital conversion sub-systems. Designed numerous circuit boards to support this effort. These designs used RF frequency synthesis, quadrature demodulation, high speed A/D conversion, and very high-speed ECL logic, among other technologies. Performed trade studies to identify which optical to electrical conversion components yielded best system performance.
AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies August 1987 – September 1997
Member of Technical Staff, (Greensboro, NC / Holmdel, NJ) April 1997 – September 1997
Designed, tested, and transitioned to manufacturing a mux/demux board used to monitor performance of undersea fiber optic transmission equipment. Worked with customer to develop specifications. Used in system reprogramable logic to provide maximum versatility. Worked with manufacturing to implement logic changes driven by system changes, which occurred as late as early production.
Member of Technical Staff, (Green...
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