Photo, Short Bio & CV web page for Ron Nicholson

(Antarctic Peninsula 2000), A window in Tuscany
(Smashing a wine glass 2009), (Great Barrier Reef 2016),

• Ron's newer Home Page

  Publications

• The Amiga: A Hardware Engineering Story: Advancing multimedia computing capability IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine ( Volume: 5, Issue: 4, Oct. 2016 )
  2 Documentaries on the Amiga, IMDB credits

  A Reading List

• Some random, interesting and/or recommended books

Bio/CV Stuff

• As founder of HotPaw Productions, I have been developing iOS applications since the iPhone App store first opened, with over 20 iOS apps currently available in the iTunes App Store, plus 1 Apple Watch app and 4 macOS apps. My current specialty is mobile device digital signal processing (DSP) for music, audio, amateur radio, and software defined radio (SDR), written in Objective C, C and Swift.

  A few years ago, I was a consultant and Senior Research Engineer at Wyse Technology (now part of Dell), working on PocketCloud and mobile thin client and cloud computing initiatives (U.S. patents 8,676,926, 8,869,239 and 9,185,171 and 9,384,526 ). Before that, I was Director of Product Architecture at Agate Logic, a fabless semiconductor start-up company, doing configurable logic (FPGA) architecture and applications engineering (U.S. Patents 7,786,757 and 8,629,006). Previous to that, I spent a few years doing embedded DSP consulting and developing PalmOS applications. Before that I was an SOC ASIC architect (developing intellectual property for systems-on-a-chip interconnect) for Palmchip Corp. in San Jose. During the dot com era, I spent several years at SGI (Silicon Graphics) developing interactive television systems and consumer multimedia/3D graphics ASICs (U.S Patent 6,275,239), about a decade too early for their time. At SGI, I also designed a portion of the Nintendo 64 Reality Co-Processor, and was also involved in the design of ASICs for the MIPS Magic Carpet and digital video servers.
  

• Once upon a time, I studied engineering and mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley (where I designed a pipelined RISC CPU for Dr. Sequin's CS152A class), later worked at Apple Computer on Apple II peripherals (including the Super Serial Card , which stayed on Apple's price list for over a decade) and on the custom IWM ("Integrated Woz Machine") disc controller ASIC and the CMOS clock chip for the original Macintosh computer ( case signatures, Mac 128k thru SE), as well as the Apple IIe. I also was part of the RF engineering team that helped test and modify the Apple II to pass the new FCC Part 15 EMI requirements. In 1983, I was one of the founders of Amiga, Inc., where I was lead hardware architect of the original Amiga system and custom chip set ( Amiga 1000 case signatures, U.S. patents 4,777,621 , 4,874,164 , 5,103,499 and 5,594,473 ). As an example of the industry reinventing old terminology and ideas, way back in 1985, I was software manager in a small company named "Information Appliance, Inc." I also did stints at Compression Labs (prototype run-length decoding hardware for a laser printer), at Hewlett Packard (helping develop early RISC workstations and GaAs supercomputers), at Sigma Designs as an engineering manager, and at Sierra Research and Technology, where I was one of the architects of an OC-12 (622 Mbps) network interface ATM SAR ASIC which was said at one time to be responsible for moving over 80% of all internet traffic in the U.S. Generic resume (pdf format).

• My hobbies and recreational activities have included Standard Ballroom dancing (plus some West Coast Swing, NY Hustle , and Argentine Tango), amateur radio (call sign N6YWU), obtaining my private pilots license (ASEL), reading books on odd topics such as the latest research in evolutionary psychology, and writing fun software for Macintosh computers, for PalmOS handhelds (PalmPilots) , and for Apple iPhones and iPads. I've also run the Bay-To-Breakers 12k race 16 times, and the Silicon Valley half marathon (just once!). I retired from Western Square Dance calling (where I was club caller for the Andante Squares in Sunnyvale and the Highland Swingers in Redwood City) over a decade ago. I've travelled to Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Copenhagen, Iceland, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Tuscany, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, China (including finding ballroom and Hustle dancing in Beijing), the Antarctic Peninsula, Buenos Aires, Blackpool, London, Paris, on Mediterranean and Baltic Sea cruises, plus scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, and some hiking in the Grand Canyon and backpacking in Yosemite and Lassen National Parks.

My Linkedin page.
@hotpaw on Twitter
My StackOverflow/StackExchange page

Email Ron Nicholson : rhn@nicholson.com or ron.nicholson@gmail.com

( Please don't use my old email addresses: rhn@sgi.com rhn@netcom.com nicholso@hpesoc1.hp.com nicholso@hpda.hp.com )
Copyright © 1999-2018,2021,2023 Ronald H. Nicholson, Jr