Jim Watson has over 40 years of experience in avionics and electronics design. He has worked for several aerospace companies designing analog and digital circuits for aircraft systems. Some of his areas of expertise include analog and digital interfacing, EMC design, switching power converters, and FPGA interfacing. He has experience designing circuits for applications such as data acquisition, motor control, and aircraft fly-by-wire systems.

1. Jim Watson
WatsonJS@aol.com 602 881 2872
21141 Canada Rd 12-i Lake Forest, CA 82630
For your company, I hope to use my design experience in analog, EMC, aircraft interface,
switching power converters, and A/D interface to FPGA, to turn company visions into cost-
effective avionics which tolerate environmental extremes of temperature and EMI, minimize
size, weight, and power, communicate via digital busses, use switching power converters to
provide internal power busses, sense and digitize inputs such as LVDTs and pressure
sensors, drive SOVs, EHSVs, or motors to control aircraft surfaces, and provide redundancy
of control such as in the COM-MONarchitecture. But as seen below, I can also do other
things.
2016 March
Parker Aerospace, Irvine, CA
Designed analog I/O, Lightning protection, EMC measures, and power conversion for
Parker’s IIM and REU used on Embraer Legacy 550 and Bombardier C-Series and
Global aircraft. Specified the LVDT acquisition oversampling algorithms used in the
FPGAs of these units. Produced life and temperature error limit analyses for LVDT
inputs and EHSV drive outputs. Designed SOV PWM drive control loops and analyzed
for stability. Resolved problems encountered in System Integration Labs and in EMC
tests. Changed the design of these units to make them programmable from the aircraft
connector. Worked with another company and the customer to resolve an oscillatory
power up problem caused by a 28V power distribution unit. Measured LVDT cable
capacitances and developed a method to specify the cable loading for LVDTs.
2009 May
Tank-Alert, Austin TX
A startup for which I designed a low cost device which, by measuring pump on-time
would alarm in the event of tank air loss.
2008 April
Honeywell, Phoenix, AZ
Worked to transform the conceptual designs of the Boeing 787 and Embraer 170/190
PACE aircraft fly-by-wire elevator, aileron and rudder hydraulic actuator controllers into
hardware that is now in production. Initial definition work included working with
customers to define the product, making tradeoffs between design alternatives, writing
requirements documents, performing statistical and worst case analyses to determine
the accuracy that could be guaranteed over life and temperature, specifying the shape
and size of the aluminum enclosure, selecting connectors and defining pin-outs, and
allocating the to-be-designed circuitry to printed wire board assemblies. Later design
work included designing and creating schematics for 16 layer printed wire board
assemblies consisting of 2600 electronic components each, designing power supply
monitoring and restart circuitry, resolving noise problems in A/D conversion, designing
LVDT demodulation circuitry accurate to better than 1%, designing pulse width
modulated DC motor drives, lab debug of switching power supplies and all other circuitry
on assembled printed wire boards, defining test routines for automated test equipment
and resolving test problems, and working with customers to resolve problems observed
in customer testing. Did EMC qual testing of Autopilots and uncovered bias shift effects
in MEMS rate sensors.
1997 December

2. Aircraft System Certification Inc, Phoenix, AZ
Worked to FAA certify a military seaplane for civilian use. Made improvements to a fault
annunciation unit.
1996 June
Honeywell Space Systems, Glendale, AZ
Performed analyses of Honeywell’s Space Shuttle MDM to verify compliance with
system requirements.
1995 June
Pencept Systems, Palo Alto, CA
Developed a pressure sensing method for measuring writing pen tip force.
1994 November
Calcomp, Scottsdale, AZ
Worked to create technology improvements and new products for tablet digitizers.
(These are devices of from 6 inches square to 4 by 5 feet which sense and transmit to a
computer the location on the tablet of a pen or a handheld mouse-like pointer with
crosshairs by sensing the voltage a coil loop antenna operating at 10KHz to 100KHz in
the pointer induces into a grid of wires within the tablet.) This work included changing
the acquisition design from a SAR based A/D converter to a lower cost Sigma-Delta
method which improved resolution and allowed the system to trade off between
conversion rate and resolution over a wide range, invention of a lower cost grid
structure, design of printed wire boards, troubleshooting to remove noise sources from
the designs (Recovered signals were a the millivolt level), and design and remediation to
reduce radiated emissions from the product to acceptable levels.
1985 October
Sperry Flight Systems, Phoenix, AZ
Worked on the design and support of heading reference systems, navigation computers,
and digital and analog autopilots for the Boeing 737, 757, and 767 aircraft. This work
included, design of interfaces for analog I/O, LVDT, synchro, resolver, and ARINC429
digital busses, design of digital circuits to transfer data acquired from digital busses
directly to memory, bit-slice processor microcoding, and design of digital and analog
printed wire boards.
1974 June
BS in Electrical Engineering University of Illinois
Patents of value:
5,373,118 Half normal frequency digitizer phase reference acquisition
4,939,318 Digitizer pen tilt correction
4,835,347 Sequence shift digitizer grid
4,820,886 Digitizer sigma delta acquisition