Conexant, Huntsville, AL

Typical Responsibilities -

• Do whatever needed to be done to improve the physical layer performance of the Conexant ADSL chipset, primarily at the physical layer, OSI layer one.
• Performance improvements were made primarily through DSP changes researched, conceived of, implemented, and tested by Jerry as part of the Conexant ADSL physical layer team.
• Some analog front-end circuitry design.
• PSD output compliance testing.
• Travel to worldwide locations to test the Conexant customer-side ADSL chipset against the incumbant Telco-side equipment. These destinations included Belgium, Germany, France, Taiwan, Korea, China, Norway, and many locations across the United States.
• Jerry was the Huntsville go-to man for squashing these worldwide contract-blocking problems on site.
• Developed a remote access technology which allowed debug of about 25% of the problems from his Huntsville desk, eliminating a fair amount of the travel.
• Build working relationships with personnel from these various telecom offices.
• By hook or crook, figure out some way to procure competitors' equipment to test against in the Huntsville facility. This was quite often against the wills of the competitors. Poor competitors.

Skills Attained -

• ADSL physical layer development and debug.
• The art of quickly packing for an overseas trip with only a couple of days notice, as was typically the case.
• Learning to work his way through whatever challenges presented themselves in these foreign locations.

General Observations -

• Of all the venues Jerry's worked at, he believes Conexant possessed the best engineering, marketing, and sales personnel he's ever worked with. Jerry was very sad to see that position drop away.

Notable Accomplishments -

• Through 7 trips to Seoul, South Korea, Jerry was a critical part of the team which exploded Conexant's South Korean market share from 0% to 100%. At that time, South Korea was the ADSL capital of the world.
• Authored a PowerPoint presentation on the basics of the ADSL physical layer. Presented it to various universities around the southeast and later to the the IEEE Signal Processing Society RTP Chapter. It is attached at the bottom of this page.