John DeRoo
30 West Main Street
Hopkinton, MA 01748
jderoo@alum.mit.edu
Summary
Experienced hands-on electronics director with personal experience in ASIC and FPGA development and management experience in ASIC, FPGA, board, display thin film transistor backplane, and software development. Proven ability to work with multiple Asian partners to develop new technology.
Experience
Pixtronix, Andover, MA
12/2008 - Present Director of Control Systems team developing ASICs, controller boards, TFT-backplane control circuits, and user interface software for high-quality, low-power, small and medium form factor MEMS-based display systems. Architected second generation display development controller system. Managed the design, layout, and fabrication of the boards; the development of the FPGA code; and the development of the Graphical User Interface code. Negotiated functional specifications with other functional teams. Worked closely with technical partners in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan using a combination of face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, and email. Travelled frequently to Asian partners’ facilities for meetings, to provide training, and to provide support. Worked with team members to generate and monitor development schedules. Managed hiring and onboarding of new employees.
12/2007 - 12/2008 Manager of ASIC Development for the development of control ASICs used in low-power, high quality displays for handheld devices. Developed architecture and chip specs for a Chip-On-Glass driver ASIC with a team in Switzerland, monitored and coordinated the chip implementation, and supervised the testing of the chip. Responsible for display technology demo preparation and deployment at trade shows in Asia and the US.
Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Burlington, MA
6/2004 - 11/2007 Engineering Manager of the 8 person Network Systems Group east-coast chip engineering team. Managed design, verification, and debug work on all FPGAs in all versions of the Sun Secure Application Switch. Managed architecture, design, and verification of programmable chips used for power management and hot-plug control of the processor blades in the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System. Coordinated and managed development of the control plane chips used in several Network Express Modules for the SB8000.
1/2004 - 6/2004 Senior Staff Engineer in the Network Systems Group, continuing the work from Nauticus on the Sun Secure Application Switch family. Produced cost-reduced version of the Stream Memory Manager used in the Sun Secure Application Switch N1000 Series. Worked on architectural definition of next-generation switch.
ASIC Design Team, Nauticus Networks, Framingham, MA
1/2001 - 1/2004 Principal Design Engineer in a networking startup creating powerful infrastructure products to deliver the next generation internet. Designed a 64GB Stream Memory Manager FPGA written in Verilog. Responsible for architectural definition, implementation, and functional and performance testing. Worked closely with System Architect and other chip designers to define the Data Flow Architecture used for communications between the chips and the software running on Network Processors.
3D Hardware Design Team, ATI Technologies, Marlborough, MA
4/99 - 12/2000 Hardware Manager of a 25 person ASIC design team working on three to four concurrent projects. Responsible for performance reviews, scheduling, resource allocation, long-term resource planning, and daily management of the team. Primary Hardware Manager for all of the Radeon graphics functionality, which was developed across three sites. Responsible for direct management of local design team, coordination of development schedules with the teams at other sites, resolution of multiple-customer issues, and communication between marketing, architecture, senior management, and the design teams.
4/98 - 3/99 Hardware Project Technical Lead of the team developing the Radeon. Gave technical direction to a team of 30 hardware designers at two sites. Developed and documented design methodologies and processes, and tested new tools and flows. Coordinated and scheduled development of documention, HDL design, and synthesis. Directly interfaced with the layout team. Mentored new hires. Refined a data manipulation mechanism and worked closely with attorneys on several patent applications.
3/97 - 3/98 Senior Hardware Designer in a team developing high performance graphics accelerators for the PC and Mac markets. Designed and implemented deeply pipelined multi-port Pixel Cache for Rage128. Coordinated work of designers in Toronto. Generated documentation and refined patent applications. Synthesized portions of the design using Synopsys, and tested the design using QuickTurn Hardware Emulator.
ASIC Design Group, Pixel Magic, Andover, MA
4/96 - 3/97 Senior ASIC Designer in a small team implementing the PM35/ PM36 JPEG codec in standard-cell silicon with VHDL and datapath methodologies. Designed, implemented, tested, synthesized, and optimized three of the five primary functional blocks in a very high speed semicustom JPEG endec chip.
Technology and Engineering Group, Quantum Corporation, Shrewsbury, MA
10/94 - 3/96 Project Leader of a 22 person team designing and implementing the disk controller chip for Quantum's high-end SCSI disk, the Atlas II
Disk and Subsystems Group, Digital Equipment Corporation, Shrewsbury, MA
1/94 - 10/94 Project Leader of a six person team implementing a very high speed PRML detector chip intended for the read-chain of Digital's next generation of disks.
3/93 - 1/94 Contributing Member of three person team working on a disk controller chip that interfaced to the AT bus.
2/92 - 3/93 Project Leader of a five person team implementing Digital's last generation of disk controller chip.
5/90 - 2/92 Lead Engineer of five person team which developed Digital's first banded hard disk controller chip.
1/89 - 4/90 Contributing Member of four person team which converted and improved a custom hard disk controller chip from NMOS to a CMOS gate array.
6/87 - 12/88 Contributing Member of three person team which developed a standard cell ASIC interface to Digital's proprietary SCSI-like bus (DSSI).
Skills
- Project management, including use of MS Project, MS Office, and StarOffice
- Technical management of Electronics hardware and software development
- Leadership of multi-site international technical development
- FPGA, Gate Array, Standard Cell, and Custom high speed CMOS ASIC architecture, development, and design with HDL and schematic methodologies.
- Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) IDC Staff Instructor.
- International Association of Nitrox and Technical Divers (IANTD) Advanced Recreational Trimix Instructor.
- Medic First Aid Instructor for First Aid, CPR, Emergency O2, AED, Bloodborne Pathogens.
Formal Education
1988 - 1990 Worcester Polytechnic Institute Graduate classes in digital circuits and systems design and signal processing.
1987 - 1994 Digital Equipment Corporation Education and Training Classes on Digital Systems Design, Error Correcting Codes, Coding Theory, C++, etc.
1983 - 1987 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering.
Issued Patents
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26 January 1993 |
Method and apparatus for transferring data between a data bus and a data storage element. |
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11 January 1994 |
Embedded servo banded format for magnetic disks for use with a data processing system. |
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12 November 1996 |
Method and apparatus for encoding data with variable block lengths |
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9 January 2001 |
Method and apparatus for accessing graphics cache memory |
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30 January 2001 |
Method and apparatus for arbitrating access requests to a memory |
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21 August 2001 |
Method and apparatus for association of memory locations with a cache location having a flush buffer |
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25 September 2001 |
Method and apparatus for assuring cache coherency |
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5 November 2002 |
Method and apparatus for compressing parameter values for pixels in a display frame |
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2 December 2003 |
Method and apparatus for accessing graphics cache Memory |
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27 June 2006 |
Stream based memory manager with function specific hardware logic for accessing data as a stream in memory |