Paul Chambers

Experienced Software Architect

San Francisco Bay Area

Current
Past

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500+ connections
Industry
Consumer Electronics
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Paul Chambers’s Summary

A Senior Systems Architect with leanings towards Product Management. More than 27 years experience providing the technical leadership, architecture, design and implementation of successful consumer products across several markets. Consistent track record of innovation.

The most current version of this resume can be found at
http://www.bod.org/resume/
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Skills Include:
• System and component-level architecture and design
• Hardware & software co-design/partitioning
• Product/Feature definition & refinement
• Extensive knowledge of consumer electronics market
• Strong technical leadership and direction
• Solid software background from GUI to drivers, reinforced by a strong understanding of hardware, user interaction, industrial and mechanical design. Able to work synergistically with specialists in these disciplines
• Excellent inter-personal and writing skills
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Experience Includes:
• Embedded systems development (e.g. home theater products, digital cameras, intelligent network cards, server appliances, etc.)
• Distributed systems (networked, loosely-coupled)
• Local & wide-area networking (including internet protocols & new protocol design)
• 'Virtual Machine' emulation (e.g. IBM PC emulation & AppleShare file server)
• Web server and website development
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Platform Experience:
• Includes: Linux/UNIX (embedded and desktop), classic MacOS, embedded RTOS and 'bare metal'. A little MS-DOS/Windows.
• Numerous C & C++ compilers and platforms, Assembler (32 bit processors to 8 bit microcontrollers), HTML/JavaScript, some Java and PHP.
• Well-versed with cross-platform and portability issues.

Paul Chambers’s Specialties:

Technical leadership. Software architecture, design, implementation. Software/hardware partitioning & co-design. Embedded systems, particularly Linux. Platform/API definition, documentation and maintenance, Third-party developer liason. Technology evaluation and vendor interaction. Excellent written and verbal communication.

Paul Chambers’s Experience

  • Sr. MTS

    Lab126

    (Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

    March 2009 — Present (5 months)

    Lab126 is a subsidiary of Amazon, responsible for the Kindle.

  • Lead Architect

    Palm, Inc.

    (Consumer Electronics industry)

    May 2006 — February 2009 (2 years 10 months)

    Senior member of the engineering team behind the Palm Prē smartphone and WebOS.

    Provided technical leadership and cross-team co-ordination for Palm's next generation operating system platform.

    Actively involved in the evaluation and selection of major silicon components.

  • Sr. Architect, Media Technology

    Palm, Inc.

    (Public Company; 501-1000 employees; PALM; Consumer Electronics industry)

    August 2005 — May 2006 (10 months)

    Sr. Architect covering media support across all Palm products.

    One patent filed.

  • Chief Architect, A/V Systems

    THX Ltd.

    (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Consumer Electronics industry)

    June 2004 — July 2005 (1 year 2 months)

    Principally involved in the creation and deployment of technologies and intellectual property related to THX's primary areas of business. Provide technical direction and assistance to product development teams. Provide technical guidance to product management and business development activities.

    The most significant poject is unfortunately still confidential. It involves creating a technology standard for the content creation and consumer electronics industries. It included hands-on development, such as writing reference code and implementing the technology on a Sigma Designs EM8620L DVD Player Reference Design. This project leverages THX's excellent relationships with both the major Hollywood studios, and major consumer electronics manufacturers.

    Helped define the feature set, wrote microcontroller firmware and co-designed hardware for the 'Visual EQ' technology, announced by THX at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show (please see http://www.thx.com/news/20050104A.html).

  • VP R&D

    Immersive Inc.

    (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Consumer Electronics industry)

    May 2003 — December 2003 (8 months)

    Immersive Inc. was a small company creating products for the high-end home theater and HTPC markets.

    Being a small company, I wore many hats; from hands-on product development, through evaluating technology partners, to answering dealer and customer questions.

    Product development was based on embedded linux (kernel 2.4) running on a Toshiba MIPS platform. Media processing was performed by a combination of specialized video processing chips and FPGAs/CPLDs. I worked on a number of software components, including GUI, middleware, kernel modules and drivers. Also assisted with board bring-up.

  • Sr. Systems Architect

    Philips

    (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; PHG; Consumer Electronics industry)

    April 2001 — May 2003 (2 years 2 months)

    Lead Architect for the group. Provided technical & architectural support to customers (product definition in particular), and technical leadership for engineering team. This group offers engineering services within Philips - all disciplines necessary to take a project from concept through transfer to volume manufacturing. Influence over all disciplines involved in a product's development.

    I was involved in a wide variety of projects while there. Two major projects concerned MPEG-2 A/V streaming over wireless networks (802.11).

    The first was a portable 10" LCD tablet designed to play media streams (both video and audio) over a wireless LAN. Ran Windows CE on dual processor architecture (x86-class and a media processor). Novel UI unified content access across LAN and internet-based content directory.

    Second project was a wireless MPEG-2 A/V stream transmitter.

    Active participant in strategy planning, interaction within Philips, and business acquition for the group.

  • Member of Technical Staff

    TiVo, Inc.

    (Public Company; 201-500 employees; TIVO; Consumer Electronics industry)

    June 2000 — April 2001 (11 months)

    Technical Lead for the UK version of the company's primary product, launched by Sky Digital (major DBS provider in Europe) & Thompson Consumer Electronics (RCA brand in the US).

    Extensive work on external device infrared control issues, including rewrite of microcontroller code, adding several new IR protocols and a huge improvement in blasting accuracy. Designed hardware/software solution for IR reception & transmission for 'Series 2' that eliminated a microcontroller. Worked closely with hardware engineer to incorporate the hardware portion in the TiVo ASIC, wrote linux device driver for software portion.

    This IR architecture is now in three generations of TiVo products, and has significantly reduced the level of support calls.

    Key contributor to the evolution of the device's remote control handset (ships with all TiVo products except Sony-branded).

  • Chief Architect

    Flashpoint Technology Inc.

    (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Consumer Electronics industry)

    March 1999 — June 2000 (1 year 4 months)

    Provide technical leadership and architectural direction for Flashpoint's sole product - Digita, an embedded operating system for digital imaging appliances. This product shipped on several popular digital cameras from Kodak and Minolta, and color inkjet printers from Epson (only available in the Pacific Rim). Strategic relationships with Hewlett-Packard and Pentax were announced at PMA 2000.

    Introduced new system architecture and created design for a discovery service, message-passing system and reference-counted memory management. Active participant in roadmap planning and scheduling. Evaluated technology presented by potential development partners. Often contributed material for presentations to OEMs and strategic partners. Advisor to V.P. of Engineering and C.T.O. Two patents filed.

  • Sr. Systems Architect

    Philips Multimedia Center

    (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; PHG; Consumer Electronics industry)

    December 1995 — March 1999 (3 years 4 months)

    DVX-8000 (way before its time - imagine a cross between a home-theater-in-a-box and Windows Media Center, but running on Windows 95...), Philips Pronto (my baby), SmartTalk (became HAVi and HomeAPI - may have influenced designs of UPnP & Jini ;)

    Eight patents filed, seven granted to date (US patents #5819294, #5959536, #6067478, #6212238, #6437828, #6480473, #6580461).

  • Software Architect

    Apple Computer, Inc.

    (Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; APPL; Computer Hardware industry)

    February 1992 — December 1995 (3 years 11 months)

    Key engineer of a electronic publishing system for eWorld (Apple's online service), based on a distributed object store. Patent granted (US Patent #5625818)

    Ported a popular object-oriented Multi-User Dungeon server (LambdaMOO from Xerox PARC) from UNIX to MacOS, and interfaced it to the eWorld service (via X.25).

    Developed a number of extensions to the functionality of eWorld's client software, including an easy-to-use Interactive Calendar and Event Navigation tool. This provided automatic compensation for timezone differences around the world, international date & time formats, and descriptions with styled text. This increased usage and attendance of events by an order of magnitude.

    Proof-of-concept work applying internet protocols and technologies to providing an online service (combination portal and ISP service). Prototypes were demonstrated to Apple's board.

    Selected as technical contact to evaluate technologies offered by external vendors.

  • Developer Support Engineer

    Steam Radio Ltd

    (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

    November 1991 — February 1992 (4 months)

    Steam Radio Ltd provided developer-level support to registered developers in the UK on behalf of Apple UK Ltd.

    Provided developer-level technical consultation to members of Apple UK's third-party developer program

    Implemented sections of a custom communications application being developed for British Airways

    Worked on portions of a router product being developed by SRL

  • Sr. Software Engineer

    International Business Software, Ltd.

    (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

    July 1989 — November 1991 (2 years 5 months)

    Key engineer on distributed virtual AppleShare file server. Product displaced the market leader in a matter of months and the company was acquired by Novell soon after. Elements of the technology found their way into versions of NetWare.

    Developed a mechanism to run an faceless application 'in the background' under System 6 (both single Finder and MultiFinder).

    Developed a mechanism to make the Macintosh file system re-entrant. The file system would have deadlocked without it, and the product would not have been possible.

    Developed mechanism to simulate a 'virtual' network node, allowing network traffic to be identified and intercepted before reaching the network. This provided large performance improvements (factors of 3-5) and reduced code complexity.

  • Sr. Software Engineer

    Insignia Solutions Ltd.

    (Public Company; 51-200 employees; INSG; Computer Software industry)

    May 1987 — July 1989 (2 years 3 months)

    Ported SoftPC from Sun 3 to the Macintosh, the first non-UNIX version. Port was complex due to the absence of UNIX services (like virtual memory) on the Macintosh. Within six months the product contributed over 50% of the company's revenues and provided the lion's share for a number of years.

    Developed a new processor emulation (of the Intel iAPX 286) with a reduced memory footprint and host processor requirements, resulting in successful products for the Macintosh Portable and other popular low-end Macintoshes. This emulator was also used as the foundation for the NeXT and later Macintosh versions of SoftPC.

    Designed and implemented a set of MS-Windows device drivers which used an emulation 'back door' to let Windows drive the host display system as an intelligent accelerated graphics card. This prototype eventually resulted in 'SoftWindows', a product Apple chose to bundle with several Power Macintosh models at launch.

  • Software Engineer

    Digital Microsystems Ltd.

    (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

    April 1986 — May 1987 (1 year 2 months)

    Developed firmware for intelligent LAN cards (media access control and name service) and communications servers (LAN to X.25/X.3 and SNA)
    Developed various layers of protocol stacks (for two proprietary LANs)
    Wrote a debugger/monitor that proved popular with co-workers (embedded and TSR versions)

    Digital Microsystems was acquired by Apricot Computers.

  • Software Engineer

    Comart Computers Ltd.

    (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Hardware industry)

    January 1984 — April 1986 (2 years 4 months)

    Developed firmware for a desktop machine (not IBM PC compatible), including a re-entrant I/O system based on interrupt and DMA services
    Developed firmware to emulate IBM PC hardware by interpreting captured bus cycles
    Implemented ROM BIOS firmware
    Ported operating systems, wrote graphics and networking drivers

  • Software Engineer

    Almarc Data Systems Ltd.

    (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Hardware industry)

    June 1981 — January 1984 (2 years 8 months)

    Developed firmware for Z-80 and 8086 S-100 systems
    Ported operating systems, wrote graphics and networking drivers
    Co-designed S-100 hi-res graphics card
    Supported developers at VARs and major accounts
    Wrote developer and end-user documentation
    Provided telephone support for end users

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