Manager Software

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DAVID STARKS

*** *********** **, ********, ***. N2T 1H7 **********@*****.***

226-***-**** http://www.linkedin.com/in/starksdavid Senior technical manager embedded software development

Known for building and leading strong cohesive teams and fostering cross-functional relationships so that complex projects can be delivered on time with high quality.

Built software and test organizations for 4 companies with team sizes of 6 to 50.

Developed embedded systems for Broadcast TV, cellular, speech recognition and avionics.

Product hardened software on 80M smartphones operating on 500 networks world-wide.

Managed technology development with chip-suppliers, research organizations, software and hardware companies in North America, UK and Israel.

Built lab and trial systems for development, integration, measurement and testing.

Systems Design depth in partitioning algorithms across software and hardware. Senior Manager Software Defined Radio 2014-present Coherent Logix, Waterloo

Lead development of a Next Generation Broadcast Television System that was live air demonstrated to North American broadcasters and helped company get IPR into the ATSC 3.0 standard and secured second phase of funding from our customer.

System includes media Gateway/server (HEVC, H.264 videos), OFDM based modulator, RF exciter transmitting over the air to a Home GateWay receiver with WiFi to tablets, TVs.

Canada site lead of 12 embedded system specialists developing Physical layer firmware on the company’s HyperX chip (100 DSP cores), protocol stack on multi-core PPC (Linux). Using off-shelf SW where possible for supporting IP connectivity, media streamers, players.

Led project to meet all milestones on time (company first) securing customer project payments amounting to 80% of company’s overall revenue (100 person)

Create project schedules, test plans for functional, integration, performance and demonstration; analysed implementation loss for receiver sensitivity analysis. Director of Software Development 2009-2014

BlackBerry (RIM), Waterloo

Software development director for in-house protocol stacks (L1). Built team of 50 embedded software and test developers covering 3 cellular technologies through prototype and product.

Managed internal teams and external partners to meet product timelines, development milestones through detailed plans, setting clear priorities and requirements with active risk mitigation. Shipped 80M Smartphones with our software on over 500 networks.

Delivered high quality software through an agile continuous development/test process.

Provided oversight and coaching for my set of team leads, enabled them to focus on the week-week development tasks with their teams. Established team in Canada (3 sites) and created processes to coordinate development of remote teams based in the US, UK, Israel.

Provided technical oversight/authority for cross-functional in-house LTE prototype through in- house certification and inter-operability testing.

Created LTE Communications Systems team which collaborated with standards and advanced technology in filing over 60 patents.

Provided competitive analysis and recommendations to senior leadership for digital baseband roadmaps for suppliers and potential acquisitions.

Wrote test strategy that set the direction and framework from link-level simulation, unit test, layer test, system integration, validation, performance and field support.

Responsible for test-equipment vendor selection and purchases ($1M+ / year).

Managed SW deliveries and the relationship with a 3rd party 3G modem company in IS. 2/2

Manager of WCDMA L1 Software Development 2005-2009 Research In Motion (RIM), Waterloo

Created software and test team that developed in-house 3G Protocol Stack (L1). Team of 14 for embedded control SW on ARM, PHY on DSP, test/validation, RF drivers and calibration.

Defined and managed the SW technology transfer from the baseband chip supplier (Intel, later Marvell) to our in-house platform. Aligned supplier to meet our objectives and timelines. Effectively partnered with the supplier’s SW team in a win-win relationship.

Led 3G L1 software team as we integrated and improved upon 3rd party source code and customized for our platform and protocol stack. We developed SW for dual-mode operation

(with existing 2G protocol stack), improved reliability, error handling and did optimizations for RF performance, battery life, calibration time which gave us the quality the company needed.

Organized and led the dual-mode (3G+2G) development which crossed several SW component teams. Ran weekly technical meetings for development, test, integration and support. Provided technical leadership and an integration-test-plan for the multi-team effort needed in creating, testing and verifying ROM masks for the baseband chip.

Did the overall technical project plan and provided leadership for the project while it was in the prototype phase. De-risked program by sequencing early field / drive testing.

Product day-day issue tracking and supported testing phases for certification, inter- operability, field testing and customer technical acceptance. Hired a senior manager to look after this team during derivative product developments including 3GPP R6 and R7. Manager of Wireless Modem Design 1999-2004

Wireless Technology Lab (WTL), Nortel, Ottawa

Led green-field prototype development that proved viability of technology that became part of LTE standard. IP was sold as part of a $4.5B patent portfolio deal.

Integrated end-end system leading my PHY (DSP) SW, protocol SW (PPC), RF and hardware teams through a series of milestones leading to key technology demonstrations.

System design and architecture of scalable prototype led to part in WiMax product.

Designed, coded and tested real-time base-station firmware in ‘C’. Team Lead, DSP Speech Group 1995-1999

Bell-Northern Research (BNR), Montreal

Created embedded software products for telephony platforms. Recognised for being able to work with complex technology and collaborate with different teams to deliver on schedule.

Made tradeoffs in latency, accuracy and implementation cost for signal processing and pattern matching algorithms to launch Wireless Voice-Activated Dialing product on time. Systems Designer, Avionics 1985-1995

Canadian Marconi Company (CMC), Ottawa

Developed embedded speech recognition system accurate enough to work in helicopters. Formed partnership with NRC and National Defence for world-first voice controlled helicopter flights giving company a market edge with heads-up control of our avionics suite.

Embedded system design, DSP fixed-point algorithms, real-time control software, hardware design and system integration for avionics sub-systems in prototypes and product. EDUCATION

1995 M.A.Sc, EE, University of Ottawa

1985 B.A.Sc, EE, University of Waterloo

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