Professional

Professional Experience

CES, Geneva (2000-present)

 

Software

 

At CES I'm the 'software guy in the hardware department'. That means that I'm heavily involved in the bring-up of new hardware. I'm responsible for the development of test programs for new single-board computers, both for development validation and for production testing. I also maintain and develop the low-level board monitor that ships with the final product, as well as writing low-level device drivers for new features. The development is done under Linux, using Emacs and the gcc/gdb toolchain.

 

The boards are typically used with real-time operating systems, most often VxWorks, but also LynxOS and Linux. For testing, however, we mainly run without any OS, to have more control over what's going on.

 

I also develop shell- tcl- and perl- scripts to automate common tasks, and to extract relevant information from log-files.

 

I am managing the development and maintenance of low-level software (100'000 lines of C-code and 5'000 lines of assembler), and have managed projects dispersed across different timezones, continents and languages.

 

 

Hardware

 

The computers we make are based around PowerPC processors (both IBM and Freescale) and custom-made FPGAs handling many of the bus interfaces and peripherals. Many devices, such as ethernet and real-time clock, are on PCI buses and we work a lot with bus- and logic analysers. Even though I don't do any hardware development, I spend quite a lot of time in the lab, measuring with voltmeters and oscilloscopes, logic analyzers and bus analysers (VME, PCI, PCIe)) as well as hardware debuggers and network sniffers. Some devices are based around ARM cores, and I have written some code for those as well.

 

 

Documentation

 

I'm also directly involved in producing the documentation for new products. All documentation is in English, and I have an excellent knowledge of written English. I have been pushing for a wider adoption of a company-wide wiki to share information among colleagues.

 

 

MCSA, Plan-Les-Ouates, Geneva (2000)

 

I worked for a small company based in Plan-Les-Ouates, Geneva, for seven months. The company was based on a clever idea by a brilliant engineer, who unfortunately turned out to be a very poor entrepreneur. The basic idea was to estimate the depth of anaesthesia in patients during surgery, by using already available data. By analysing the complexity of the ECG signals it is possible to gauge the relative activity of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which can be used as an indicator of how deeply anaestezed the patient is.

 

There I was first exposed to TCL/TK and wrote several small applications to be used for data-logging during clinical trials.

 

 

Kraftelektronik AB, Surte, Sweden (1999)

 

I worked for a medium-sized company outside Gothenburg, with a project to control a high-power high-voltage rectifier. The goal was to use a microcontroller to control the MOS-FET transistors in a rectifier. This was for a transormer that could deliver aproximately 1-5A at 1kV, used for electrostatic filters in flue gas emision control. I worked with a small microcontroller from Infineon, in close collaboration with the hardware designer.

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Contact:thorsten@christiansson.ch