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Engineering Tasks |
Support Environment |
Also At This Time
| On this page: | Basics |
Engineering Tasks |
Support Environment |
Also At This Time
|
Basics| Employer | Nokia Ltd., Camberley |
| Dates | June 2001 - present |
| Business area | Cellular Radio Infrastructure |
| Position | 6 month contract |
Engineering Tasks| Post Design Support |
Successful investigation and solution of obscure and sometimes rather involved problems that initially were attributed to one board, but had a more complex cause. |
| Component
Change Validation |
(This became less a important part of the work as time went
on.) |
Post Design
Support| Project | Cellular Radio Infrastructure |
| Sphere of Work | Existing product post design support |
| Responsibilities |
Investigate and understand subtle and involved problems that initially are reported as board faults but where initial testing fails to find any fault on the board. Underlying problems range from subtle board problems to complex system interactions. To put this in perspective, the majority of my time at Motorola was spent on one complex problem. It took many months to reproduce the problem in the lab following consistent reports from customer sites (other prople had failed at this), and several months to home in towards the actual cause. The problem turned out to be a software (commercial RTOS) problem, though the ability of hardware effects to influence its severity kept the possibility of a hardware problem alive until the very end. |
| Hardware Skills | Digital
|
| DSP Skills |
Work with existing code in 56xxx assembler.
Adapt 56xxx assembler test routines to give better problem detection. Design/coding of new assembler test routines. |
| Software Skills |
Design of complex, mulit-threading general purpose test management software, some coding in C (using National Instruments CVI). Later major recoding of much of the test managment software (retaining the original design) to overcome several problems in the coding, in association with major extension of the software. There were in excess of 800kbytes of documented source code. Documentation using the Doxygen tool. Work with existing system code in C; some minor modifications to produce test versions of the code. Code management using the Clearcase tool. |
| Debug/Test Skills | System level and board level testing.
|
| Support Activities |
Laboratory PC for terminal emulation/data recording. MS Access for complex information storage. |
Component Change
Validation(This became less a important part of the work as time went on.)
| Project | Cellular Radio Infrastructure |
| Sphere of Work | Detailed testing of a complex digital/DSP board to
establish the suitability of alternative components for use on the board.
This involved careful, detailed 'lab bench' testing as well as highly automated testing during thermal cycling. |
| Responsibilities | Define the tests to be performed in
each case - to test the new components as well as possible without wasting time
on other areas of the board.
Assist in the production of the software to perform the automated testing. Perform the bulk of the manual testing, and set up and monitor the automated testing. |
| Hardware Skills | Digital
|
| DSP Skills | DSP circuit understand/test |
| Software Skills | Large Procomm script for test
management
Small C++ programmes that provide intelligent, parallel low level IO facilities for Procomm Complex Visual Basic scripts / MS Access database for test results analysis |
| Debug/Test Skills | System and board level testing
|
Support Environment| Desktop Computer Systems |
|
| Desktop Software - General |
|
Also At This Time| Software skills | Various small - medium size Windows programs written
in Delphi using OOP methodologies.
Some minor Visual Basic routines. |
