richard's life history

I went to the Royal Grammer School in Newcastle from 1976 to 1986. After leaving school I went on to read Mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford and graduated in 1989 with 1st Class Honours.

After leaving Oxford, I joined British Aerospace Space Systems in Stevenage working on research and development of advanced communications systems aimed primarily at future satellite payloads. In 1994 the company became part of Matra Marconi Space. The group I joined came to specialise in the design of digital signal processing satellite payloads. (Since I left the company has again changed its name to become Astrium Space .

I was married to Rebecca in 1996. We have 2 children.

In autumn 1999, we moved from Stevenage to Weston-super-Mare ( Weston's wikipedia entry ) in the south-west of England. I started a new job at STMicroelectronics in Bristol, working on microprocessor architecture for the SuperH series. In the autumn of 2001, my part of the company de-merged from ST to form SuperH Inc. combining the SuperH teams from Hitachi and ST. My work activities during the SuperH era included:

• Responsibility for the architecture of the SH-5 CPU core + debug functions
• Joint maintainership of sh64 architecture support in Linux
• Contributions to sh architecture support in Linux
• Optimisation of audio and video codecs to target special features of the SH-4 and SH-5 instruction sets (e.g. vector FPU, graphics acceleration instructions, SIMD multimedia instructions (on SH-5))
• Generation of test plans and verification tests (either hand-written or by use of a proprietary test generator).
• Analysis + debug of verification test failures on RTL
• Characterisation and analysis of defects in evaluation silicon
• Development + enhancement of Linux board support packages and debug of prototype boards

In late 2004, the SuperH era came to an end and I returned to ST. My activities have stayed pretty similar to those during the SuperH times, except with a complete focus now on the SH-4/ST40. (The SH-5 architecture has now fallen by the wayside, apart from a number of boards still in use by hobbyists.)