Rick Broussard

A 70 person startup. Technical lead for two person team developing an Instruction Set Simulator in Java under Eclipse using an Agile development processes for a massively parallel MIMD architecture.

• Implemented a 100% cycle-accurate behavioral Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) in response to customer needs.
• Created an innovative, adaptable ISS architecture that reduced support and development costs.
• Increased simulation performance by a factor of 3 by writing a simple thread scheduler to execute threads in parallel and yet retain cycle accurate execution.
• Managed tradeoffs of multiple simultaneous tasks so that all tasks were done when needed and with their given priority.

A 1.5 billion dollar company. Analyzed project areas, refined problem descriptions, and developed technical solutions for incremental product features in C, Perl, Csh and TCL under Windows, Unix / Linix.  Scheduled projects beyond one release cycle.

Compiler:

• Initiated and instituted formal process that resulted in 75% reduction of integration time into the compiler for third-party vendor's software.
• Provided technical leadership for group in Beijing, developing timely software solutions used to restart stalled compiler development project.

PrimeTime (static timing analysis):

• Created test mechanism for new design readers using tests for the existing design reader, resulting in a comprehensive test suite of 2000+ test cases in just 2 weeks.
• Created Perl and Csh scripts to daily run design reader tests, create an HTML report, mail results to managers and engineers, to keep everyone up-to-date on feature quality.
• Completed a "virtual memory" module that halved the memory footprint of large designs with only a minor increase in execution time.

A 7 person consulting firm. Architected and implemented software solutions for both client and company products in C++ under Visual Studio.

• Designed and implemented a simple GUI debugger for simulators that was retargetable, greatly reduced simulation debug time, and was used to demo hardware simulations to customers.
• Led two person team that created cycle-accurate Instruction Set Simulators (ISS) for two DSP architectures that doubled company product offering.
• Ported client code from Unix to Windows NT.
• Extended client linker and simulator to work with a new architecture.

A 60 person startup. Created innovative and elegant solutions for complex software problems.  Technical leader for project.  Scheduled projects and implemented software to meet schedule.

• Architected and implemented back-end of optimizing C-Star compiler for SIMD DSP architecture. C-Star is a parallel variant of C.
• Reduced debug time by designing and implementing part of an innovative expression tree viewer.
• Led a three person team for one year to design and implement microcoded library of vector operations and neural network operations for SIMD DSP architecture. Completed all projects within schedule.

A 60 person contracting and tools company. Developed a retargetable tool to both aid assembly language programmers and work as an instruction scheduler for an optimizing compiler back-end. All work was in C under Unix.

• Improved instruction scheduling performance by a factor of 7.
• Developed as part of a 4 person team code to find defects and measure wall thicknesses in engine parts for a client.

A 25 million dollar company. Create new software and maintain existing software for the company product line.

• Maintained and developed microcoded math library and linear equation solver for large systems of equations.
• Wrote and ran tests to validate product development and releases.