First of all: I love embedded systems. There is something oddly satisfying about creating systems which – if ever finished – do something useful when you turn them on.
I built my first single-board computer when I was 16 using the good old Motorola 68000 (double-sided home-made PCBs – Those were the days…).
Then my embedded career was “interrupted” by uni and my Ph.D research in Photonics.
I then had the privilege to co-found the company adaptif PHOTONICS together with my former colleague Ralf Stolte. We built test systems for fiber-optics applications which contained DSP-based embedded systems and quite a lot of analogue electronics.
In 2007, Agilent Technologies acquired our company. A few years later, in 2011, I joined the company Finisar in Sydney. I am now responsible for developing Optical Channel Monitors, a small sub-system which can measure an optical spectrum with GHz-resolution.