Oliver

My career path

Like so many engineers, I started taking mechanical things apart as a kid to see how they worked, but it was the opaque nature of electronics that really intrigued me. I have worked at the bleeding edge of hardware technology on monster ASIC chips at Socionext, and my first foray into satcom through RF and digital control was 28G optical SerDes networks at Airbus. Working at Hanwha Phasor is a whole new ball game. Designing hardware for a phased array for mobile satcom, especially for aircraft, is a giant leap by anyone’s standards.

Why my work gives me professional satisfaction

At Hanwha Phasor, we’re not building one antenna but 4,000 on each of our transmit and receive arrays. This involves some 150 printed circuit boards, 17 of which are unique. To get the high performance we need, they’ve got to be orchestrated to the nanosecond.

As a digital engineer here, the joy lies in bringing all the components of a highly complex distributed system into a controlled state and working in concert.

There will be many more versions of our launch product for inflight comms – different frequencies for aero variants, plus land and maritime applications. Pioneering a new product makes all the pieces of this puzzle endlessly fascinating for me.