From:
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 5:33 PM
To:
Subject: What I am up to
Hi Frank,
I have been at the same company (Analog Devices Inc) now for over 5 years and have gotten to do a bunch of different things since I have been here. Here is a quick explanation of what the EMU Tools group does which is the group that I am part of. Our company sells DSPs(Digital Signal Processors) which are found in cell phones, car audio, home video/audio, digital cameras, modems, and many other things. Customers who want to produce one of these products or some other product will purchase evaluation KITs from our company to evaluate the DSP and find out if it will meet their needs. The KITs are produced by the HW team in the group that I am in and I have written much of the firmware that runs on these evaluation KITs that allows our debugger on the PC to communicate with the DSP contained on the KIT. Our debugger is very much like Visual Studio where you can run code on the DSP and debug the code by stepping through it and viewing registers and memory etc just as you would with any other program that is written. All of our KITs now are USB so I have worked on the USB Windows driver as well as the software on the PC that communicates to the firmware on the KIT.
I have written a plug-in for our debugger that allows a customer to program a flash device on either one of our KITs or on their own custom board. So I have done some GUI work as well. We take customer support questions at least a few times a week. We also have to be able to test each of the KITs that we ship to make sure all parts are working correctly which is something I have had a major part in.
Each KIT is a standalone unit and connects directly to the PC via USB but we also sell emulators which allow for customers to create their own prototype boards and use an emulator to debug the code running on the DSP. You should have seen one of the boards that came in one time. It was basically a 8 inch x 16 inch cell phone. It is amazing considering how tiny the final product is. Our emulators are USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 and we also have a PCI version. I have worked on all of these as well quite extensively.
I have also written a bunch of assembly language code that runs on our DSPs so that customers can use it to develop their own applications. I have done other things along the way but that is the majority of it. Oh we also ported over one of our major products to Linux in this past year. It was pretty interesting and irritating considering none of the members of my group had ever used Linux before. I wasn't a big fan of Linux but we got it done and of course it is not being used by anyone which is what most of us figured would happen. Okay, I guess that is all. I will keep in touch.