Nigel Berrie

I have more than 35 years experience in the industry, working on all stages of the design cycle, from feasibility, through specification, prototype design, design evaluation and optimisation, integration of RF and baseband, Approvals testing, specifying production testing, training production personnel to do RF testing and fault diagnosis, to helping to take products into Mass Production. I have also some experience of supporting marketing personnel, and of interfacing with customers adopting a design as part of their system.

The first decade was on largely discrete OEM designs, but the second decade was mainly with Silicon Vendors, including undertaking LSI circuit design on BiCMOS and CMOS processes using Cadence. Since then I am now back to working with OEMs.

Currently I'm working on Mains Powered Optical Fibre Measurement systems - using Intel (Altera) FPGAs, NIOS II softcore, writing NIOS II firmware as well as Atmel based firmware. In addition responsible for designing and developing circuitry for APD receiver chains and laser drivers, lock-in detectors, and modulator or AOTF drivers - which is where my RF background comes in particularly handy.

My RF Design experience encompasses paging down to 25MHz, up through portable FM receivers, DAB Band III receivers, Boeing 777 video distribution headend, UHF PMR, CT2 basestation, GSM900, DAB L-band receivers, GSM1800, GSM1900, and on up to a 4GHz on-chip BiCMOS VCO, and some work on an X-band (8.2GHz) satellite transmitter stack.

Specialties:
Avalanche Photodiode receiver chain design
Design experience Analogue / RF to 4GHz
Design for OEMs (RF discrete circuits, handheld/portable receiver and transmitter circuits)
Design for Semiconductor Vendors (RF LSI CMOS, BiCMOS)
Design for Paging/PMR/P25/CT2/GSM900/GSM1800/GSM1900/DAB plus a few products not consumer electronics (eg Boeing 777 Inflight Entertainment / Military Radio)