Experience

• Director of Engineering, Element Labs Inc., Apr. 2006 to Apr. 2007
  Primary product: LED based entertainment and architectural signage.
  The company was an aggressive three year old startup when I joined. I was a member of the senior management team and a major contributor to establishment of an R & D facility in Silicon Valley. I contributed to all facets of infrastructure definition and implementation, including facility setup, engineering staff and middle management (Director peers) hiring, defining the product development process, legacy product technical support, defining the new product technology roadmap, the hands on design of the initial networking and control products, management functions of the engineering department (8 staff + multiple consultants), intellectual property generation (sole or partial author of 12 patent applications), mentoring of junior engineering staff, and negotiation of numerous contracts. I architecturally defined and launched development of an ASIC with significant improvements over commercially available LED driver devices.
  Reason for leaving: Overlapping and uncontrolled scope of authority with a founder and VP of the Design Departme

• Director of Engineering, Leapfrog Enterprises, Jan. 2005 to Apr. 2006
  Primary product: High technology educational consumer products (toys) for children.
  I was the sixth Director of Hardware Engineering at the $700M/year company. I was responsible for Director level activities of international product development, manufacturing support, and new product definition. My responsibilities included project and engineering resource scheduling, department budget management, department staffing, technology investigation and review, product design review, contract negotiations with vendors (> $1M), engineering representation in video product core group, and travel to contract manufacturing facilities in China to resolve production issues. High technology consumer products require extremely efficient and cost effective designs plus high yield in the manufacturing process. My multi-disciplined technical experience was fully used to assure that new products such as the L-Max, Fly pen top computer, and Little Leaps DVD player controller were optimized for value and designed with worst case tolerance for high manufacturing yield.
  Reason for leaving: Los Gatos R&D facility would be closed in a few months which made me receptive to recruitment by Element Labs.

• Director of Commercial Imaging, Intevac, Apr. 2003 to Nov. 2004
  Primary product: Intensified imaging products for commercial, military, research, and medical markets.
  I started as a design engineer and as my engineering and project management skills were revealed I progressed over the next year to Engineering Manager and then Director. During this time I defined a superior architecture for the company's imaging electronics and signal processing methods. This resulted in the creation of a series of highly integrated camera products that were smaller, lower power, less expensive, and dramatically superior in performance to what the company previously had. The design was featured in the Altera corporate presentation and I was interviewed numerous times in the trade press. I did the hardware design, the programmable logic design, and developed numerous systolic signal processing algorithms for improving the video images. As Manager and then Director I assumed responsibility for department staffing and built the department from 3 engineers to 7 plus multiple consultants. I also negotiated outsourced services contracts, drafted engineering contribution to customer proposals, evaluated new technology, managed projects, performed engineering design reviews, gave engineering mentoring to the junior staff, and provided inter-department coordination. From time to time I would continue to make design engineering contributions when the staff needed assistance due to scheduling pressure or to solve difficult problems.
  Reason for leaving: Intevac is a spin off of Varian Associates whose 17 year old Photonics Technology Division developed hostility towards the successful new Commercial Imaging Group I managed.

• Consulting Design Engineer, Mainnovation Inc., Jan. 1979 to Jan. 2003
  Primary product: product engineering consulting.
  I worked as a self employed engineering consultant. I had diverse clients and worked on a variety of contract models including fixed price, time and materials, per diem, and joint venture. I had many repeat clients due to their satisfaction with my focus on problem solving, my generality of skills allowing them to deal with a single person, my ability to optimize solutions for their problems by balancing analog + digital + programmable logic + software technologies, my comfort with physics as it might relate to their product, my quality of work, my cost effectiveness, and my integrity as a businessman. I typically worked independently and off site at my lab facility but sometimes I also worked as a member of client's internal engineering teams. My personal inclination as a generalist by nature plus the cost, efficiency, and convenience benefits of not having to sub-contract portions of a job to other contractors caused me over time to expand my skill set until I could do most jobs without sub-contracting any tasks. Fixed price contracts motivated me to develop my characteristics of practicality, cost effectiveness, time efficiency, risk control, schedule management, and careful negotiation.
  Reason for leaving: Changes in the economic and foreign competition circumstances plus the communication industry collapse after 2001 made consulting unviable.

• Additional experience. Details available on request.
• Magazine Columnist, Multimedia System Design Magazine
• Research Engineer, The 3DO Company
• Director of Engineering (acting), Hasbro Electronics
• Design Engineer, ADDA Corporation
• Design Engineer, Consolidated Video Systems
• Design Engineer, Meadows Games Inc.