Christopher Bird
About Christopher Bird
At heart I'm a self-motivated computer software engineer with a passion for C/C++, FPGAs and microcontrollers. My interests have carried through my previous years of employment and drive me to do the best I can for both myself and others. I love solving problems, taking on challenges, and collaborating with others to learn and grow. In my current position at Lattice Semiconductor I build and manage Logic Synthesis tools, including but not limited to physical/timing constraint resolution, logic optimization, and HDL parsing methodology. I work frequently with Verilog, VHDL, and System Verilog designs both for verification/testing and improving implementation. Using mostly C/C++ and scripting languages, I enjoy finding smarter ways to perform a task, solve a problem, or run tests. Throughout my time here I've had the opportunity to interface with people of all different experience and knowledge levels, learning from many and teaching others. Knowing how often to ask for guidance, who to go to when I'm stuck, and truly embracing the benefits that others can provide to me and that I can provide for them has been one of the greatest learning experiences so far. Building a knowledge and experience base has allowed me to create roadmaps and solutions that stand up to the critical eyes of other engineers, while still learning from and implementing the suggestions from other developers. Before Lattice, I trained in computer engineering at UC Davis where I had the opportunity to be a part of larger scale projects. Some fellow students and I built a UAV system which used a combination of microcontrollers and FPGAs along with sensors and computer vision to create a detect-and-avoid system. Determining proper lighting conditions, fine-tuning the vision information, and finally experimenting out in the field was an enjoyable learning experience. Along with this, I also took part in research using OpenCL to build complex image processing algorithms to track people and objects as part of a neural network. Outside of work hours I enjoy solving Rubik's cubes, playing piano, woodworking, and building systems with microcontrollers. I have a youtube channel dedicated to teaching people how to solve the cube which I started back in middle school. My current breadboard project is an 8-bit computer from wires to timing. I look forward to continuing my work in software development in and around the FPGA/Embedded systems world.