Welcome!

Greetings! Life has been busier than busy these last few years, between full time engineering and full time parenthood - two jobs, really. Below you can read an overview of family, technical, and writing highlights.
You will find assorted contact details below.

Family Highlights

Let's start with family life. (If you want to skip forward to the technical stuff, click or scroll down.) The big news for 2008 was the arrival of our baby girl, Denali! Denali arrived in September a few days before her official due date. A healthy 7 pounds, 6.7 ounces, Denali was sleepy and peaceful for about a week, then turned into a marathon daytime feeder after that. As I write this update, she is already two months old and 11 pounds. She makes cute baby smiles now, usually followed shortly thereafter by loud wailing for a feeding or diapering. Before long she'll be starting daycare and figuring out what her legs are for.
In 2005, we had twins, Blake and Colby. They arrived two months earlier than they were supposed to, landing me in the hospital just a few days after I had stopped making the long commute into the office.
Sadly, Blake died a few days after he was born, but Colby made it beyond his shaky start and has thrived. He is now an energetic three year old.
Colby, who has apparently left toddlerhood behind, now insists he can do everything by himself. We're in the midst of potty training, making steady, if not quick, progress forward. Colby attends daycare, which keeps his days activity-filled with art and books and playground fun. He loves to play with his toy cars and trains; he enjoys putting jigsaw puzzles together and digging in the dirt. He helps me with cooking and baking and feeding the cats.
Wayne is still working for Rohm & Haas and enjoys his Porsche and Porsche activities as a hobby. We've been organizing scenic drives around the area. Check out Wayne's pages for some of his great photos. Photography is another favorite pasttime.
We've gone through some changes with our cats, as well. We adoped two kittens, Taio and Talia, last year after we lost our nine year old Cally to a fast-moving cancer. Our old guys, Montana and Apollo, are still with us, attempting to maintain their dignity in a house overrun by all these hyper kittens and children. I'll be updating PussiCam before the end of the year with lots of fresh content.

Technical Highlights

Some readers may recall that after we left Massachusetts I took a couple years off to work on my writing, something I've wanted to do for a long time. I wrote stories and worked on a novel while developing my writing voice, but eventually it was time to return to engineering before I forgot everything technical.
I joined Infinicon Systems in 2004, a start up specializing in Infiniband switches for high performance computing. The company rebranded itself into SilverStorm Technologies and finally got purchased by QLogic Corporation. We've been part of the QLogic family since the end of 2006. We're no longer a start up, but we have as much work as ever. I really like QLogic. The company is big enough to give us a strong presence in the market, but not so large that it makes you feel insignificant.
I'm part of a small but effective hardware design team in King of Prussia, PA. Being in such a small group is great because you get to do a bit of everything. I've work on hardware design, schematics, supervising layout, debugging new designs, investigating sustaining issues, developing the odd FPGA or CPLD, writing specs, and so on. My speciality is management design at the baseboard and chassis level, but I've gotten to do everything from architecting complex I2C trees to debugging unstable power regulator circuits, from writing code for an NXP microcontroller to overseeing the transition of our Arena PLM system during SilverStorm's incorporation into QLogic's Agile.
I like the detailed hardware design work the best. It's like putting together a large jigsaw puzzle. There's component research and talking to vendors; designing communication topologies and working with the embedded software team; connecting bridge devices, processors, buffers, I2C devices, and Ethernet switches; planning for hot swap protection and power supervision; even fiddling with mundane FETs and LEDs and resistor dividers.
Occasionally I also get to unravel some design problem that has everyone stumped in the lab. My second day there I discovered a bug in the power design of a new board that prevented it from powering up, and not long ago I pinpointed a faulty oscillator circuit that manifested as misbehaving ports, which turned out to be a manufacturing defect unique to a new board spin. It's like "the butler did it": you should always start with resets and clocks.
I've made a lot of good friends here and marvel at how quickly the time has gone by. It's hard to believe how my career has evolved. I remember my first job out of college, designing wiring harnesses for BFIST and doing a tiny bit of FPGA code for C2V when I worked at United Defense, wondering if I was cut out to be an electrical engineer. The people were great but the technology was more about low level integration. Then I got my first taste of complex hardware design at Stanford Telecom.
A job-change prompted move shortchanged my time at Stanford, but got us out of the housing-expensive Bay Area and into our first house out East. After we settled in Massachusetts I found my way into Ascend, (formerly Cascade, later Lucent) where I created embedded microprocessor designs for their ATM switches. That was a fantastic job. While there, I found my place as a hardware design engineer working in a vibrant environment with some great people. It was a hard act to follow (especially those early days when the company was on the rise, before telecoms soured), but here I am in another neat company, QLogic. I don't much like the thirty mile commute to King of Prussia, but having a fun job with great people makes it worthwhile.
To my former and present colleagues, thanks for being so supportive over the years! Even if we haven't talked in a while, I'd love to hear from you. A special thank you goes to those who have provided advice and mentoring.

View my resume, revised November 2008. "Senior Hardware Engineer with 11 years of experience in hardware design in leadership role. In depth understanding of board design cycle: researched, designed, performed schematic capture, coded & simulated Verilog, analyzed timing, documented, debugged & verified prototypes. Supervised technicians and layout designers. Commercialized industry-leading InfiniBand products. Motivated, detail-oriented team player with strong communication and multi-tasking skills." (Location - Philadelphia/Trenton region, commutable from Doylestown, Pennsylvania. PA, NJ)
If you prefer, here is a short Technical Bio.

Writing Highlights and other Links

My interests go beyond engineering, because I also love writing. I'm currently working on my first novel and I'm the moderator of a peer critique that meets at the Bucks County Free Library in Doylestown.
For the latest information on my creative writing, visit Writing News. I don't have a lot of spare time these days, so updates are sporadic. One of my latest works is Cookie Chronicles for 2007.
If you are looking for information or general entertainment, I have compiled a variety of Links, including including news, writing, science fiction, etc.
Don't forget to take a moment to look at my husband's pages. Some neat photos in his gallery.

Contact Details

The fastest way to reach me is via Email. I'm also present on the following services:

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Email me for specific contact details.