From: Gregory Spears <gspears@nortelnetworks.com>
Organization: Bay Networks Inc
To: Frank Archambeault <farchambeau@fsc.edu>
CC: spears@nortelnetworks.com
References: 1 , 2
After 2 1/2 years of working for Nortel Networks, my first major product was shipped to its first customer last Friday. The Nortel Networks Passport 5430 Multiservice Access Switch is an Enterprise Class (i.e. designed for business use) switch designed for branch offices (college campuses to...) It can transmit voice, data, and video over the internet. I wrote the diagnostics code for the memory, UART ports, pcmcia ports, snproms, Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) Bus and Compact PCI bus. I also did some work on the WAN cards (ISDN, Serial, T1, E1). The 5430 uses Motorola's MPC8260 PowerQUICC-2 Integrated Communications Processor as its CPU. We were an Alpha site and helped Motorola develop this processor.
I should explain what Diagnostic
Engineering involves. As a Diagnostic Engineer I work directly with the hardware
engineer to prove his hardware works as designed. When the first piece of
hardware arrives in the lab, it is the diagnostics code that proves there are no
shorts in the bus, registers are connected to the right device, and there are no
conflicts between devices on the board. I do most of my programming in C, but
also must
write code in Assembly to get the board
through its initial boot and to test stack memory before we can set up a
stack.
To write diagnostic tests I need to understand how the hardware works. Weeks of reading design documents proceed the first line of code that I write. After I understand how the hardware should work, I can write the interrupt service routines, exception handlers and hardware drivers and all the tests for the different components. When the hardware arrives in the lab, its just like your hardware class, only someone else has wired up the board and my tests have to find their mistakes.
This week I started work on a Carrier
Class Router (i.e. designed for use by ISP and large telecommunication
companies). Compared to the 5430,which is the size of 1980 P.C., this carrier
grade router is the size of a large
college dorm
refrigerator.
I hope the CS department can take some pride in knowing that the very first lines of code run on the Passport 5430 were written by an FSC Graduate.
The Customer Data Sheet for the Passport 5430 can be found at:
http://www.nortelnetworks.com/products/02/datasheets/3442.html
--
Greg Spears Direct
978-288-1307
Software Engineer
gspears@nortelnetworks.com
Nortel Networks
600 Tech Park
Billerica,
MA 01821
New Update From Greg -- 10/14/04
Frank,
I was
just checking out the FSC Computer department website and saw
you still had
my letter to you up on the website. That letter must be
almost 5 years old. I
remembered you said you like to hear from alumni
from time to time to hear
what the latest trends are in the industry. I
thought I would give you an
update as to what I am up to.
Bay Networks was
bought by Nortel Networks about 5 years ago. I've
been with Bay/Nortel for 7
years now. I'm now working on my fifth
hardware
platform.
Most of that time I was writing diagnostic
tests. These are tests
used by the hardware engineers to verify there design
on the hardware
when it first arrives in the Lab. Manufacturing Engineers
would then
take these test to verify the hardware they were building worked
before
shipping to customers. Six months ago I moved to a new project and
now
work for a team writing drivers code.
When I first started here
I only had a Sun workstation. Later I had a
PC to read and write documents
and still had the Sun to develop code on.
With my new project, I shut off my
sun workstation and use a PC running
LINUX. My first project I wrote code
using C and assembly language for
the PowerPC. Now our drivers code is done
in C++. Other projects I have
worked on used a Bay/Nortel OS. Newer projects
are moving to Carrier
Grade Linux OS.
I hope the Computer Science
Department is still growing at FSC. I
heard rumors of a new CS building that
was planned. Has that made any
progress?
Greg
Spears