Designers Corner with Prof. Mike Smith  Part 1

Getting everything and everyone to work

Our Xilinx intern from UC Santa Cruz, Brandon Pearce, had now joined the team. Brandon quickly became the PC and Logic Analyzer expert and set up everything in the lab. We made a friend of the Xilinx lab manager, Bill Pabst. Bill turned out to be the first person we would turn to whenever we had a hardware problem. Bill didn’t always have the exact answer (though more often than not he did), but with his vast wealth of experience in troubleshooting digital design the answer always seemed to appear when he was around. Hamish settled in to the enormous task of writing all the code and began by outlining a specification. I ran around buying or borrowing whatever we needed; talking to salespeople, distributors, and the chip suppliers field application engineers (FAEs); and generally tried to steer the course ahead. Almost without effort, we had settled into a team.

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