Jason Pennington

FPGA Design Engineer

Personal Profile

Dr. Jason Pennington has been working in the signal processing and FPGA developed area for six years. Currently Jason is employed by Northrop Grumman Corperation.

Research Experience

Digital Design Engineer

Northrop Grumman Corperation October 2016 – Present

Lead FPGA designer on Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA
Played vital role in getting program back on schedule with FPGA design flaws on Xilinx Virtex-7.
Lead firmware engineer on Altera Arria-V

Research Computer Engineer

Air Force Research Laboratory June 2014 – Sept 2016

Design and develops techniques in hardware assurance for the Avionics Vulnerabilities and Mitigations Branch.
Project lead of 5 hardware assurance projects.
Active role in mentoring young engineer’s in hardware design.
Manages Government purchase card budget.

IRAD Proposal Awarded for Electronic Warfare Receiver Design

Mentored modulation detection algorithm research; implementation on USRP version 2
Research Sub-Nyquist sampling to increase bandwidth
Consultant on inverse beamforming thesis to null jamming transmitter.

IRAD proposal Awarded for Adaptive Optics Algorithm Implementation

Functionally verified in ModelSim branch-point tolerant reconstructor; implemented in VHDL
Integrated new HDL blocks in existing system on Virtex-5 S95t
Effectively communicated design tradeoffs and performance issues with embedded processing to adaptive optics experts

Graduate Research Assistant

Air Force Institute of Technology June 2011 – May 2014

Large Scale MIMO Communications

Designed MIMO transceiver utilizing spatial and frequency separation for pilot allocation in Mathworks MATLAB
Designed and Implemented frequency separation MIMO transceiver in VHDL, simulated in Mentor Graphics ModelSim Simulator.
Simulated effects of topology induced delay in MIMO transceiver – designed a time-domain based equalizer to remove interference.

Time Difference of Arrival Positioning

Designed and simulated a scheme for synchronizing multiple receivers in MATLAB.
Simulated a time of arrival estimation algorithm, that exploits signal structure, in Mathworks MATLAB.
Implemented time of arrival estimation algorithm and synchronizing algorithm on a Virtex-4 FPGA.

Graduate Research Assistant

Miami University May 2009 – May 2011

Implemented electronic warfare (EW) techniques on the TI-TMS320C6416 fixed point DSP. (Frequency and Power estimation)
Investigated automatic modulation determination schemes.
Investigated EW receiver characteristic extraction

Graduate Researcher

Air Force Institute of Technology Summer 2010

Created documentation for a Software Defined Radio, the Wireless open-Access Research Platform (WARP).
Implemented signal strength recording system to collect data to verify positioning models.
Collected, organized and compared data from multiple instrument readings with existing sources.

Design Team Member: Electroencephalogram Project

Miami University August 2008 – May 2009

Won 2nd-place out of 20 teams in the poster presentation session.
Worked with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital on applying signal processing techniques (i.e. FFT, wavelets, and chirplets) in EEG data.

Key Skills

  • Mathworks MATLAB
  • VS C++ Programming
  • Tcl/Tk Scripting
  • Python Scripting
  • VHDL Programming
  • Xilinx ISE and Vivado Design Suite
  • Mentor Graphics ModelSim Simulator
  • TI-TMS320C6416 Assembly

Teaching Experience

Adjunct Professor

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio August 2014 – Present

Committee member of a thesis on automatic modulation detection.
Senior Design Co-Advisor – Automotive diagnostic via sensor data fusion
Invited as guest lecturer for talk on MIMO Communications

Air Force Institute of Technology

Dayton, Ohio Sept. 2015 – June 2017

Committee member of four MS seeking students topics include Radio Tomographic Imaging and Anti-Jam beamforming.
Hardware Design Fundamentals Short Course – September 2015
Facilitated 10 demos for Cyberspace 300 courses –taught wireless jamming fundamentals to 300+ Cyber professionals

Education

Air Force Institute of Technology

Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering June 2014

Miami University

B.S. and M.S. in Computer Engineering May 2009 and 2011