Lodestar Space
London
My main project has been designing a high speed network switch that lets the different computers and sensors onboard a satellite talk to each other reliably. Think of it as similar to the router in a home network, but built to survive the extreme conditions of space and to guarantee that critical data always gets through on time. Rather than using an off the shelf chip, I built this switch using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), a type of chip that can be configured at a hardware level to do exactly what a specific space mission needs, without sacrificing the speed and reliability of standard networking equipment.
As the first FPGA engineer on the avionics team, I took ownership of this switch from initial concept through to a working, tested design supporting 14+ ports, each sustaining over 9 gigabits per second. I made key architectural decisions, such as choosing how data physically moves through the switch to guarantee fast and predictable delivery times, and designed systems to reliably keep track of every device connected to the network. I also worked closely with hardware engineers designing the surrounding circuit boards, and with software engineers, to make sure the switch fit smoothly into the wider system.
I developed practical FPGA design skills, including building complex digital systems from scratch, verifying that a design behaves correctly using both simulation and mathematically rigorous formal verification tools, and optimising designs to fit within a chip's physical resource limits. I also learned to debug hardware directly, using tools such as logic analysers to inspect real electrical signals when a design did not behave as expected, and to reason carefully about trade offs between speed, reliability, and resource usage when no single design choice was clearly best.
Being the main FPGA specialist on the team taught me the importance of communicating complex technical decisions clearly to colleagues from different engineering backgrounds, and the importance of remaining open to feedback from different backgrounds when working in complex multi-disciplinary projects. I learned to balance independent ownership of a major project with the need to design around other people's constraints, rather than in isolation. I also regularly presented my progress using diagrams that simplified the underlying design, so that colleagues without a background in chip design could follow and contribute to key decisions.