Dates: May 2013 to August 2013
Location: Santa Clara, California
Position: Hardware Engineering

At Arista, I was a member of about 30 or so hardware engineers designing the circuit boards powering their network switches. Being an intern, I wasn’t able to design production boards that went to customers. However I was given the opportunity to design a test board (see picture on the right) for a switch controller board, which would be used in the factories to ensure the controller boards manufactured by Arista functioned correctly.

Being the sole designer of the board, I was able to take the design from beginning to end, including the following stages of the design:

1. Functional spec creation: Defined the hardware architecture of the board, as well as the registers used in the onboard Xilinx FPGA and Altera CPLD.
2. Schematic entry: Created board level schematic in DxDesigner. Exported netlist and devices list in order to facilitate layout.
3. Layout overview: guided and reviewed layout of components on the board before fabout and assembly of the test board.
4. Verilog coding: leveraged and adapted existing Verilog code for the onboard FPGA and CPLD, allowing storage and manipulation of data in PLD registers by the Device Under Test (ie. the switch controller board)
5. Bringup: debugged and reworked first batch of test boards delivered in order to make them functional. I had a particular issue with a twisted PCIe link that took me at least 4 days to fix. I also used this time to test and debug my verilog code.
6. Board re-spin: After finding all mistakes and ensuring the test board worked, I updated my schematics to fix the circuit errors and sent them out for a final production run.

I should note here that before the work term I had no experience working with DxDesigner, and minimal experience in Verilog or HDL coding. In addition to learning Verilog and using DxDesigner I also had the opportunity to evaluate a few CPU core power supplies for a different project -in particular for their response to high current loads and imbalanced phase currents.

Dates: September 2012 to December 2012
Location: Cupertino, California
Position: Engineering Project Manager -iPhone/iPod/iPad accessories

In the fall of 2012, Apple introduced Lightning -the new connector interface for its mobile devices. As an intern in the accessories engineering department, I was tasked with performing and managing the failure analysis of customer returned lightning equipped accessories.

Dates: January 1st 2012 to April 27th 2012
Location: San Jose, California
Position: Hardware Design Engineering
Sample of work: Work Report

At Nuvation, I was part of a team that worked on the development of a
Battery Management System (BMS) reference design, particularly for use in future electric vehicles and grid energy storage systems.

In particular I worked on the schematic and circuit design of the Tank Controller Board -used to communicate with the Pack Management boards and interface the BMS to the rest of the vehicle.

To that end I used Altium Designer to create schematic symbols and sheets, LTSpice to simulate and evaluate the complex circuits, and the plain old internet in order to research and select IC”s and electrical components that would fulfill the requirements of the system.

And as a design meant for automobiles, there are a lot of requirements and elements to consider. Factors such as large operating temperatures, high current draws, large noise, and large transients ranging in the hundreds of volts were all needed to be taken into account when designing the circuits. As a reference design it was also important to ensure good documentation and flexibility, to ensure easy bringup and debugging (as well as future improvements).

I also did some hands on lab work as well, using equipment like multimeters, soldering irons, etc. in order to prototype parts of the circuit for use in a benchtop test unit (which also doubled as a tradeshow demo).

A good example of some of the work I did can be found in my work report. In this report I talk about the design and simulation of a surge stopper circuit, used to protect the sensitive integrated circuitry of the board from the harsh transients of a car’s 12V battery.

Dates: May 2, 2011 to August 26, 2011
Location: Kitchener, Ontario
Position: Electrical/Mechanical Engineering
Sample of work: Work Report

At Christie, I was part of the Entertainment Systems Business Unit (ESBU) -the department that designs digital projectors for use in movie theaters.

In particular I worked on two main projects throughout the term: one electrical and one mechanical. The electrical project was for future product development, while the mechanical project was for existing improvement.

The electrical project consisted of the testing of placement and selection of bypass capacitors. Common decoupling/bypass methods of circuits on PCB’s use rules of thumbs or simulators in order to determine the number and value of capacitors to use. The tests I performed were to test the effectiveness of each decoupling rule of thumb, as well as the accuracy of a PCB decoupling excel based tool.  This project taught me a lot about concepts such as PCB mutual inductance, embedded capacitance, as well as the non-ideal frequency-dependent nature of capacitors. I also gained some hands on skills, like working with a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) and how to surface mount solder small components (as small as 0201).

The mechanical project was the development of a method to improve the airflow and cooling of one of the projector model’s electronics. In particular, the cinema processing FPGA on one of the projector’s PCB’s was receiving insufficient airflow and was heating up to almost 90 degrees Celsius. This overheating affected nearly 2500 projectors in the field. I worked with an engineer to experiment a number of ways in order to improve this cooling, and came up with the idea to change the normally linear flow into a more circular flow (see left image). This simple change significantly improved the airflow of the FPGA and dropped its temperature by 30 degrees Celsius.

Dates: January 4, 2010 to April 20, 2010
Location: Brampton, Ontario
Position: Advanced Systems Engineering
Sample Work: Work Report

At MDA Space Missions, I was part of the Advanced Systems Engineering team, which develops vehicle concepts and for potential space exploration missions for the Canadian Space Agency and NASA.

In particular I worked on the development of a lunar manned rover concept, as well as a lunar lander offloader. For the lunar manned rover concept I was responsible for the concept and CAD modelling (in Unigraphics NX) of the Human Machine Interface, as well as helping to brainstorm ideas for the drivetrain. As a member of the team, I also got to help them present the design to senior managers and engineers at the Canadian Space Agency’s Headquarters in Montreal (see right image).

For the lunar lander offloader I helped in the concept development of robot that would be able to offload a manned lunar rover, while weighing under 500kg and fitting within a confined space. The tight space and weight requirements led to a hybrid forklift and crane concept that could transport both the 2 ton rover and itself off the lander and onto the lunar surface.

In addition to those two projects I also helped with the mission architecture planning of an orbital satellite servicing and refueling vehicle.