A. Neil Birkett, Ph.D.

Career Highlights

• System Architect for AM/FM radio receiver including RDS for MP3 and vehicular use.
• IceFyre Semiconductor Inc. technical lead to develop a 54Mbps OFDM based modem transceiver based on LINC transmitter with pre-distortion compensation. Assessed the initial IP for soundness, developed the transceiver architectures and digital algorithms, mentored a group of design engineers on best solutions In the course of the 4 years I spent at IceFyre, I architected large sections of the product and was involved in all major architectural decisions, customer meetings, technical due diligence, SRED submissions.
• Owner and manager of a successful consulting firm under 10 employees (Maplebrook Consulting Inc. see www.maplebrook.com).
• Originator of several worldwide patents and author of 12 technical publications.
• Designer and architect of several successful high volume commercial PCB and ASIC based products.
• One of the three original founders of a small high-technology firm (NexLink Communications) focusing on mixed signal wireless applications, CDMA WLL.
• Primary system architect for Philsar’s Bluetooth chip, the lowest power device available (22mW)  implementing the BT V1.0 standard, a determining factor for the acquisition of Philsar by Conexant Systems Inc. for US$186M in 2001.  3 year term.

Main Skill Set

• Expert knowledge of RF design, low noise, SSPA design, antenna design and matching, starting from my days as a HAM radio operator.
• Technical due diligence, patent analysis, expert witness.
• Expert knowledge of translating mathematical concepts into working simulations using Matlab, Simulink and RF prototypes.
• Expert knowledge of developing, implementing, and testing, analog mixed-signal and DSP algorithms targeted for ASIC implementation as an architect of several successful  high volume commercial products such as the SKY72313 transceiver (Philsar 2401), IceFyre’s SureFyre LINC based transceiver (ICE5350), Kaben AM/FM receiver with RDS.
• Expert knowledge of adaptive linear and nonlinear filtering/equalization, echo cancellation, multi-channel signal processing and neural network non-linear algorithms and their DSP techniques.
• Expert knowledge of audio processing techniques, systems and signals.
• Recent working knowledge of MIMO, Space-Time and multi-antenna systems, including SVD and Unitary Decomposition methods, A/B/C channel formulations for 802.16e.
• Expert knowledge of different Fixed Multiple Access Schemes (Point-to-point and point-to-multipoint WLL, CDMA, TDMA , FDMA, BlueTooth, 802.11 a/b/g/n, 802.16.4 “Zigbee”, LAN/WLAN, and UWB), bursty traffic schemes, and most recently 802.16e “WiMAX”, and the DVB-T and DVB-H standards as applied to Sirius Satellite Radio transmitters.
• Expert knowledge of DSP based carrier recovery, bit-timing recovery, adaptive I/Q compensation, adaptive DC offset adjustments.  Implementation on a TMS320C2811 DSP, code composer, C.
• In-depth knowledge of satellite access techniques, modulation, coding and signal processing.
• Customer prime for all technical and contractual aspects of projects. Day –to-day project and business development, SR&ED submissions, technical mentoring.
• Business development, proposal writing, customer interaction, contract development, company president, technical lead for a small team of design experts. Strong presentation, speaking and writing skills.

Experience

Defense Industry Design

• OFDM and 1553B bus adaptive interference cancellation using SFTF algorithm.
• Part of a team working on a 200Mbps OFDM modem with adaptive tone mapping.
• Electronic Countermeasures Equipment (ECM) design, prototyping and testing. Started an electronic countermeasures division from ground zero and developed a DSP-controlled RF transmitter “countermeasure” product in 10 months for the purpose of disabling radio controlled explosive devices from a 30m distance (Med-Eng Systems).
• System level design and specification, digital board, upconverter board design, layout, debug.
• Antenna design and testing, patch, inverted L, waveguide.
• Class E (70 % efficient) HPA design (SPICE and ORCAD Layout) development, debug, 30W.
• Dual band antenna matching, coaxial and binocular balun design.
• Aircraft Health Usage Monitoring System (HUMS): Design, development and integation of low and high accuracy Analog Data Acquisition (ADA) Cards with analog front end, uP controlled A/D sampling, TMS320C31 embedded S/W (written in C) and DSP processing,  2-pole and 4-pole IIR filtering, FFT, interprocessor communication, Quicklogic FPGA for address decoding and wait-state generator, SRAM, FLASH memory, DPRAM with H/W semaphores.  White Mountain development platform, CodeWright, GO-DSP Code Composer Debugger.

RF Systems Design

• AIS marine receiver acquisition and CIC filter design.
• “Whitespace” 802.22 Wireless Microphone Tuner and high rate transceiver AFE design, adaptive antenna match (Eagleware) and schematic (ORCAD).
• Asset location and monitoring “smart card” RF and DSP development for NLOS applications including printed antenna, inverted “F”.
• Adaptive Digital predistortion modulator for Sirius Satellite transponders employing 8k FFT OFDM per the DVB-H standard. Simulink simulation study and architecture recommendations.
• TMS320C54x DSP algorithm (cross coupled dual PLL) for GPS combined carrier/data recovery for CWGPS demodulator.
• Inmarsat GDU up and downconverter synthesizer card design.  Ultra small form factor.  Dual PLL, 70MHz interface.
• L-band down converter for in-flight services phone/data communications, including low noise amplifier..
• Rx and Tx multi-pole elliptical filter design.
• Aeronautical GDU up and down converter design, breadboard, debug, including double conversion architecture, synthesizers, VCO's. -96dBc/Hz @ 3KHz offset.
• Triple loop low noise synthesizer enhancements at 50 kHz, 45 MHz and 165 MHz,  BER testing.
• Ensure Monte Carlo and performance for medium volume production.
• RF safety device design migration to EU frequencies, 433 MHz. Volume production experience (Monte Carlo simulation, yield analysis) for 50K units.
• Cellular capacity analysis for adaptive rate FWA system.
• Asset Monitoring System for portable devices, OOK 9600bps, 300ft range, 900MHz.
• 406 MHz phase locked ELT debug and revision.  Packet transmission, PSK, BCH forward error correction, Alterra FPGA.
• T1129C 121.5 MHz Emergency Locator Transponder (ELT): RF subsytem development, oscillator, diplexer/filter design.
• CPL300 Dual Band 121.5MHz/243MHz ELT: RF Subsystem design and development.
• Inmarsat Mobile Satcom Antenna Subsystem: 9 element patch/corporate feed, 1.6 GHz.
• SAR Dual Band Antenna: 410MHz/5.4 GHz.  8 Element patch and corporate feed.

ASIC Industry

• Commercial AM/FM radio receiver employing all digital demodulation and RDS data recovery, implemented in Matlab/Simulink, with fixed point in digital back-end.
• 802.16e Cartesian feedback linearization for 26dBm output PA.
• 802.16e WiLAN transceiver design, including calibration for I/Q mismatch, LO feedthrough, carrier nulling and adjacent channel rejection filtering.
• Mixed digital/analog VGA for radio receiver.
• WiMax PA RF feedback predistortion simulation and modeling.
• IEEE802.11a 5.2GHz WLAN system-on-a-chip design.
• System level design, architecture, PAPR reduction algorithms for OFDM.
• Analog specifications, digital receiver, tracking and acquisition algorithms.
• Digital I/Q compensation, digital DC offset cancellation, calibration and dynamic IM2 removal.
• IEEE802.11 a/b/g system design and initial analysis of 802.11n MIMO.
• Space-time coding (Alamouti) and SVD based decomposition methods.
• "Blue-tooth" radio architecture design. 2.4GHz ISM band. 1Mbps short-range FHSS GMSK.
• System level design, architecture, complex filtering, RSSI, AGC DC compensation algorithms.
• Complex PLL, Binary FSK and quadricorrelator detection for Gaussian FSK.
• NEC WCDMA frequency planning and radio architecture system level design.
• 3G PCS standard architecture development using DS synthesizer and ADC techniques.

Optical Systems Design

• OC192 (10Gbps) ultra small form factor transceiver design.
• FEC analysis for 10.7Gbps transmissions.
• OC48 (2.488Gbps) differential trans-impedance amplifier and main-amplifier re-design.
• DPSK 128kbps optical supervisory channel design and implementation, BER < 1e-6.
• BFSK  33kbps optical supervisory channel design and implementation, BER < 1e-6.
• Bit Error Rate tester for OC3/12/48 and Gigabit Ethernet.
• Design and development of a supervisory channel on OC1-OC48 optical transceiver to send and receive low data command status information using low modulation AM/PSK techniques.
• Use of Code Composer 2000 to develop a low bit-rate modem system on a TMS320C2811A embedded processor for an Optical sub Channel with variable bit-rate (300 to 2400bps).

Advanced Signal Processing

• Classification of radar doppler signals using recurrent and non-recurrent radial basis functions, feed-forward neural networks and K-nearest neighbours algorithm. Algorithms written in Matlab and C.
• Assist in preparation of report summarizing results.

Audio Digital Signal Processing

• Analog signal processing and conditioning including microphone preamplifiers-surveillance.
• Selection of low noise microphone elements, anechoic testing, preamplifier design.
• Selection of ADC components, sampling rates.
• Selection and development of a 29:1 speech/audio compression algorithm.
• Speech compression on C6711 DSP (SPEEX and Adaptive Multirate Wideband).
• Multi-microphone beam steering algorithms and signal enhancements.
• Speech enhancement algorithms (noise reduction, activation functions, etc.).
• Measurement of SPL, frequency response and SNR to meet customer specifications.
• Report on jitter buffer techniques for audio transmission over ZigBee.

Additional Information

Computer Skills

Simulation:    EagleWare, MATLAB/Simulink, PSPICE, Systemview, C++.
EDA:               ORCAD V9.0 capture and layout
DSP:               CodeComposer2000, TMS320C2406, TMS320L2811
Productivity:   MS Project and office suite.

Professional Interests

• Adaptive signal processing.
• High speed digital, RF and audio signal processing.
• Modem development.
• Broadband wireless communications, RF signal processing.
• Digital communications, modulation, equalization and propagation.
• System Level design and simulation.

Education

Ph.D. [Systems and Computer Engineering]
Carleton University. Thesis: Nonlinear Adaptive Filtering with Application to Acoustic Echo Cancellation.

M. Eng. [Electronics]
1988, with distinction. Thesis: A SAW based Transversal Filter for Adaptive Time Domain Equalization.

B. Eng. [Electronics]
1983, with distinction.

Scholarships
NSERC 1992-1994. Ontario Graduate Scholarships 1994-1997

Publications

1) S. Rauhala, N. Birkett, J. Wight , “Performance Analysis of a Frequency Offset Correction Method for an OFDM System” IASTED International Conference on Wireless and Optical Communication Banff, July, 2002 and Wireless 2002 Conference, Calgary.

2) Dr. Norm Filiol, Dr. Neil Birkett, Dr. James Cherry et al. "A 22mW Bluetooth RF transceiver with Direct RF Modulation and on-chip filtering" ISSCC 2000 paper TP13.4.

3) A. N. Birkett, “Nonlinear Adaptive Filtering with Application to Acoustic Echo Cancellation”, Ph.D. Thesis, Carleton University, 1997.

4) A.N. Birkett, R.A. Goubran, "Conjugate Gradient Reuse Algorithm Using a Variable Step-Size Line Search", 1997 I.E.E.E. International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Hong Kong, June 1997.

5) A.N. Birkett, R.A. Goubran, "Nonlinear adaptive filtering with FIR synapses and adaptive activation functions", Proceedings I.E.E.E. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Munich, April 1997.

6) N. Birkett, R. A. Goubran, "Nonlinear loudspeaker compensation for handsfree acoustic echo cancellation", IEE Electronics Letters, Vol. 32, No. 12, pp. 1063-1064, June 1996.

7) A.N. Birkett, R.A. Goubran, "Fast nonlinear adaptive filtering using a partial conjugate gradient algorithm", Proceedings I.E.E.E. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Atlanta Georgia, Vol 6, pp. 3542-3545, May 1996.

8) A.N. Birkett, R. A. Goubran, "Limitations of Handsfree Acoustic Echo Cancellers due to Nonlinear Loudspeaker Distortion and Enclosure Vibration Effects", in 1995 I.E.E.E. ASSP Workshop on Appl. of Sig. Proc. to Aud. and Acoustics, New Paltz, New York, Oct. 1995.

9) A.N. Birkett, R.A. Goubran, "Nonlinear echo cancellation using a partial adaptive time delay neural network" Neural Networks for Signal Processing V: Proceedings of the 1995 IEEE Workshop, pp. 249-258, Aug. 1995.

10) A.N. Birkett, R.A. Goubran, "Acoustic Echo Cancellation Using NLMS-Neural Network Structures", Proceedings I.E.E.E. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Detroit, Vol. 5, pp. 3035-3038, 1995.

11) A.N. Birkett, R.A. Goubran, "Acoustic echo cancellation for handsfree telephony using neural networks" Neural Networks for Signal Processing IV: Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE Workshop, pp. 249-258, Aug. 1994.

12) A. N. Birkett, “A SAW Based Transversal Filter for Adaptive Time-Domain Equalization”, M. Eng. Thesis, 1988.

Patents

• Up/Down conversion circuitry for radio transceiver, US7194044, March 20, 2007.
• SAW Device Tapped Delay Line and Equalizer, U.S. Patent 5,051,709. Sept., 1991,  Patent CA606,058.  Nov. 1991.
• Complex Phase-Locked Loop Demodulator for Low-IF and Zero-IF Radio Receivers, U.S. Patent  6,785,346, Aug. 31, 2004,  Patent CA2284948 April 4, 2001.
• Method and Apparatus for Dynamically Generating Multiple Level Decision Thresholds of  an M-ARY Coded Signal, US Patent  6317062, Nov. 13, 2001,  Patent CA2296209 July 7, 2001
• Complex Filtering/AGC Radio Receiver Architecture for Low-IF or Zero-IF  U.S. Patent 006977976, Dec. 20, 2005, European Patent # EP1230738, Canadian Patent 2289823, July 6, 2004
• An M-ary PSK classifier for improved packet detection capability.  Patent application,  November 2002 (IceFyre).
• A complex domain frequency offset circuit for OFDM. Patent application, January 2003
• Digital controlled VGA and AGC algorithm, Patent application July 2003

References available upon request for technical and management experience.