Alex is Content Director of Design News. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of InformationWeek.com. In his more than two decades as a technology editor, Alex has written for ACM Queue, Byte.com, McGraw-Hill's Electronics magazine, and IEEE Spectrum. He has served as managing editor of Mechanical Engineering magazine. He spent the 1990s at UBM's Electronic Engineering Times, where he broke the nationally known story of Intel's Pentium floating-point division bug in 1994. Alex has appeared as an industry analyst on CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and MSNBC. He's a frequent panelist and moderator at industry conferences. He holds a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Cooper Union.

Typically through his own company, Embedded & Mobile Systems (www.emsys.net), Wil Blake works developing embedded, mobile, and desktop data collection applications that regularly use microcontroller units. His initial MCU work occurred as an intern at Eastman Kodak researching the efficacy of Forth in advanced manufacturing control systems built around Z80 controllers. A subsequent Z80 PC option board design provided asynchronous terminal emulation for a Wang Labs glass teletype acknowledged by Bill Gates as pioneering. Subsequent microcontroller projects have ranged from condition monitoring  and POTS telephony to sensor data collection, using MCUs including the Motorola 68HC11, Cypress PSoC, Atmel AVR, and a modernized 8051 variant from Analog Devices.

Adam Carlson has a degree in aerospace engineering, and is currently a Senior Mechanical Design Engineer with Eagle Technologies.  He quickly realized that electronics had the ability to give life to his mechanical creations.  About four years ago, he began learning C programming for embedded design.  After a handful of smaller projects controlling motors and lights, Adam's current projects include stability augmentation for underwater autonomous vehicles and attempting to apply noise canceling to everyday situations.  He has a love of learning, and probably spends more now on textbooks than he did while in school.

You can find out more about me on LinkedIn-http://lnkd.in/txReSR

Curt is an electrical engineering product of Georgia Tech and an "automata theory / theory of computing guy" product of the University of Florida. For all intents and purposes, his entire career was spent at Texas Instruments, where he had his first encounters with an MCU (the TMS1000, the basis of many early hand-held calculators) and spent a short time as the manager of the company's military microprocessor business (where it quickly became obvious that "business tycoon" was not his future). To correct for his businessman shortcomings, his boss got him promoted to a corporate long-range planning job, where he spent the balance of his working life. Curt has also been a contributor to Circuit Cellar and its forums and spent quite a bit of time in the Silicon Labs user community. Now retired, he has an assortment of MCU and FPGA evaluation boards in his workshop, and his current focus is on the TI MSP430 "Launchpad" board. He enjoys seeing how much functionality can be wrung out of the smaller MCUs with just a few K of memory.

Brian is a recent graduate of The College of New Jersey where he found his love for the perfect blend of hardware and software that embedded design offers. He currently works at Picatinny Arsenal where he designs rugged embedded systems for the Army and spends time outside of work on many of his own projects. As a hobbyist he has moved from Arduino to PIC to Cortex M chips, and hopes to help those who want to upgrade to the power and freedom of 32 bits. 

Nicolás Cheker was born and raised in Montevideo, Uruguay, a small country in South America that has more cows than people (hence his insatiable appetite for cow meat). He discovered his passion for electronics at a very early age, when he was around six, so he decided he would study electronics engineering just to be able to put back together all his family's electronic gadgets and toys. He also promised his mother he would invent a nanny robot for around 100 nuevo peso (a now extinct Uruguayan currency, worth around 10 dollars at that time). As expected, we are nearer to landing on Pluto than to fulfilling such a heartfelt promise. During high school he always worked to build electronic circuits copied from local magazines, until one day in college he came to understand how they really worked. Also, in college, he discovered his definitive passion inside electronics: embedded systems, so he pursued this path in his professional career. Nicolás has designed hardware and firmware for several embedded electronic products in the industrial, consumer, telemetry, and military industries, several of which have been certified to FCC, SAE, and UL standards. He also provides consultancy services on embedded systems design. He now resides with his wife in Santiago, Chile, and since mid-2009 he's been attending the "Practical Diaper Replacement Courses for Caring Parents," earning his Master's degree in Diaper Changing and Formula Milk Bottle Preparing disciplines.

Michael Dunn has been messing with electronics almost as long as he's been walking, and got his first scope around age 15. Things have gone downhill since then. The scopes now vie with wine racks, harpsichords, calculators, and 19th century pianos for space. Over the years, he's designed for the automotive, medical, industrial, communications, and consumer industries, as both freelancer and employee, working with analog, digital, micros, and software. Since 2000, he's run the TekScopes Yahoogroup, now with over 5,000 members.

Duane's involvement in the hardware and software design world goes back to the days of the CDP1802 and Z80 up through current processors such as PIC, AVR, and ARM. In his day job, he has been dishing out PCB layout and DFM (design for manufacturing) advice via the Screaming Circuits blog since 2006. After hours, he designs microcontroller and motor control boards for small robots; primarily using PIC 16F and 18F series chips. His prototype assembly experience ranges from solderless prototype boards and wire-wrap to hand-soldered surface mount parts to fully-automated machine assembly. As the author of Screaming Circuits' blog, Duane presents solutions to technical challenges brought on by smaller chip packages, shrinking support staff, and tightened schedules. He is also a contributor to industry technical publications and conferences on the topics of design for manufacturability, trends in prototyping, and ways to improve efficiency in product development efforts.

Tyler Gilbert is an embedded systems engineer and the creator of CoActionOS.  He has a BSEE from the US Air Force Academy with an emphasis in embedded systems.  Following college, he worked on the avionics of the A-10.  After the Air Force, Tyler earned an MSEE from Stanford University and has since worked for small companies designing embedded systems hardware and software.

I have been designing mostly high voltage power supplies for Travelling Wave Tubes and Cathode Ray Tubes for a long time. On occasion, I have also designed low voltage supplies. I also designed microwave amplifiers using these TWTs for a variety of applications, such as satellite communications, RADAR and Electronic Counter Measures. Sometimes these systems get fairly complicated and I started using microcprocessors in HV supplies to help with control and monitoring in the late 1980's, which was considered by many to be a stupid idea at the time. How times change!

Of course, the march of microcontrollers has not stopped since and they are now pervasive. Just a week ago I used a small Silabs 8051 uC to generate a stable 80kHz clock because it required fewer components and was smaller than a 555.

I started my career in France in the late 1970's and I moved to the USA in 1985. If you read my comments, you may spot the occasional French word!

I consider myself more of an analog guy gone astray with software, but I think that significant exposure to both worlds has served me and my customers well. My analog experience gives me a solid skepticism of the infallibility of digital systems, yet it is obvious that digital systems have allowed precision analog to shine for what it is best for.

I always welcome a healthy debate about the relative merits of both, and how to approach the difference in a way that improves the end product.

Born and raised in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Aubrey Kagan completed his electrical engineering degree at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and obtained an MBA at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He immediately started working in electronics and was fortunate enough to be around as microprocessors made their first inroads into industry. He was initially involved with designing controllers for industry and mines, with projects encompassing coffee packaging machines, railroad communication controllers, hydrological data monitors, automatic calorimeters, and diamond sorters. The isolation of South Africa (geographically, economically, and later politically) allowed him to gain a wide range of experiences with many aspects of the industry, including analog and digital circuit design, the use of PCs (including the use of spreadsheets) to gather data, and the early use of CAD.

Aubrey now lives in Canada. Here he originally worked on the specifications for the Canadarm 2 (the remote control arm on the International Space Station), but he is now involved with far less grandiose projects. He is Engineering Manager at Emphatec, a Toronto-based design house of industrial control interfaces, signal conditioners, and switch-mode power supplies. Aside from brief forays into the i80960, i8096, and IM6100, all of his experience has been on 8-bit micros – including Intel (8048, 8051, 8080, 8085), RCA (1802), Zilog (Z80, Z8), PIC (16Cxxx), Scenix (SX18), TI (TMS7000, MSP430 – 16 bits!), and Cypress (PSoC). His specialty lies in blending the linear with the digital hardware and then processing in software.

Aubrey has written several technical articles for Circuit Cellar and has contributed several design ideas to EDN and Electronic Design as well as an application note for Cypress Microsystems. He has also made a few contributions to Max Maxfield's "How It Was" series and Max/Brian Bailey's "Travel Nightmare" series. He is the author of Excel by Example: A Microsoft Excel Cookbook for Electronics Engineers.

Mark is a Product Manager at GE Transportation in Melbourne, Fla. He works on communications, safety designs, and control systems products for onboard locomotive systems. Mark's primary tasks include systems architecture development, embedded software design, and customer application integration.

Massimo Manca started to develop embedded systems in 1987 using Motorola 6805, 6809, and Hitachi 6301 microcontrollers as the central control unit to drive minilabs and photofinishing machines made by Gretag San Marco and San Marco Imaging. He started Micron Engineering in 1995 to sell R&D services and to consulting about embedded systems development to small- and medium-size companies. In the last 20 years he has worked with more then 30 different microcontroller families, designing photographic equipment, minilabs, thermocontrollers, white goods, small appliances, automotive electronics, weighing scales, small medical systems, data converters, variable message signs (for traffic control systems), portable terminals, and a lot of other disparate applications. He is an NXP partner and a Renesas Alliance partner. He works and lives in Pordenone a little city in the north east region of Italy about 80 km east of Venice.

Dr. Mani works as the Principal of an engineering college in Kerala, India (http://www.aisat.ac.in/content/faculty). He has 18 years of industrial experience and 18+ years of teaching experience. He spends most of his leisure time designing microcontroller-based gadgets and promoting HAM radio (call sign VU2ITI). He has designed many automotive, industrial, and consumer electronics products and is a design partner of Microchip USA. He regularly participates in MCU design contests, conducts workshops and seminars, and guides student projects related to embedded systems and microcontrollers. Dr. Mani is a graduate in electrical engineering, PG in digital electronics, and PhD in acoustic instrumentation.

Patrick started his engineering career in the medical diagnostics quality control field with Technicon (Ireland) Ltd., before joining Electronic Products in 1990. Since then he immersed himself in communications systems design with Electronic Design and covered communications technology and design with EETimes, before become an editor with EETimes in 2005. After TechOnline merged with EETimes, he took the role of Editorial Director, Design and Products, for EETimes Group, responsible for both the e-learning as well as the group's Designline franchise. After a brief hiatus as Director of Content for Hearst's Electronics Group, he returned to UBM as Director of Content for EDN, EETimes' Designlines, and Test & Measurement World. He has a National Certificate in Electronic Engineering from the Sligo Institute of Technology and a National Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Dundalk Institute of Technology.

Clive "Max" Maxfield began his career as a designer of central processing units (CPUs) for mainframe computers. Over the years, he has designed everything from silicon chips to circuit boards, and from brainwave amplifiers to Steampunk "Display-O-Meters." For those who like to know these things, he received his BSc in Control Engineering in 1980 from Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, England. His numerous technical articles have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, including ED, EDN, Chip Design, EE Times, PCB Design, and the electronics and computing hobbyist magazine, Everyday Practical Electronics (EPE). Also, he has held contributing editor or executive editor roles at Programmable Logic DesignLine, Chip Design Magazine, SOC Central, and Everyday Practical Electronics. Max is the author and/or co-author of numerous books, including Designus Maximus Unleashed (Banned in Alabama), Bebop to the Boolean Boogie (An Unconventional Guide to Electronics), Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers), EDA: Where Electronics Begins, 3D Graphics on Windows NT, The Design Warrior's Guide to FPGAs, FPGAs: Instant Access, and How Computers Do Math. He is also a freelance high-technology writer and consultant at Maxfield High-Tech Consulting LLC (www.CliveMaxfield.com).

Jayaraman Kiruthi Vasan graduated in electronics and communication engineering from the Institution of Engineers in India. He currently works at Tuscano Equipments (P) Ltd. as General Manager for New Product Development, where he is actively involved in medical device development from opportunity identification to market release of the product. With an experience spanning over 25 years, his major focus had been medical devices development, apart from brief stints in product marketing, technical support, and entrepreneurship. Being passionate about sharing knowledge with younger minds, he blogs on product design concepts and tips. He is an active social networker and a music lover

Ryszard Milewicz is a mixed signal design engineer and IT specialist with a BSEE from Wroclaw University of Technology. His interest in electronics dates back into late 70s when he read a book called Modern Toys: Electronics at Home, Work, School, where he found hundreds of schematics and ideas that inspired him to start doing his own electronics experiments. Some of those early experiments included electronic percussion (Kraftwerk was very popular in those days) from which he migrated in the 80s to microprocessors, using the famous Sinclair ZX81. Ryszard is now a designer of industrial control, communications, and measurement systems using MCUs like the Atmel AVR, ARM Cortex M3, Renesas RX62N, and Microchip PIC16. He is now engaged in machine-to-machine communication projects, power management, and solid state lighting circuits, most of them MCU-controlled. He especially likes to find nonstandard applications for ICs.

Warren Miller has extensive design experience. He was one of the inventors of the 22V10 (back when bipolar was a technology, not a disorder) while he was at Advanced Micro Devices. He also worked at MMI and Actel in product planning and applications, authoring more than 100 conference papers, application notes, magazine articles, and user manuals. Warren has also held director and VP-level positions managing a networking engineering team at AMD and the demand creation and FAE team in distribution for Marshall and Avnet. Currently, he is an independent consultant for www.wavefrontmarketing.com, providing technical marketing for semiconductor, IP, and tool companies. 

Celso Ken Mori Monteiro is an entrepreneur, consultant, and designer of vehicle electronics since 1981. He's currently the director and owner of Flexmotronics, a company specialized in networked embedded systems for vehicle manufacturers, tiers and aftermarket apps. He has more than 25 years of experience in automotive hardware and software design. Celso's design customers include GM, Ford, VW, Mercedes-Benz, Fiat, Scania, Navistar, Marcopolo, AGCO and Petrobras. He is a member of SAE since 1987 and recently of SAE Brasil. Celso is also a member of FTI-ISOBUS, working group of ISO that develops data communication protocols for farm machinery. He was also a singer, and two-term president of the award-winning Choir of UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul), where he studied chemistry, computer science and electrical engineering.

Steve's career has been closely tied to microprocessor and microcontroller developments for more than two decades. As a serial entrepreneur and veteran of many small companies, he understands how changes in microcontroller designs and specifications affect nearly every aspect of an electronics business, from profitability and supportability, to manufacturing, test, and Website development. Starting as the Director of Engineering with Linx Technologies in the early 90s, Steve began a 15-year journey in the RF and wireless branch of engineering. In the ensuing years, he has designed more than 50 products that incorporated microcontroller and RF technologies. In 2001 he started Radiotronix, which became a market leading supplier of embedded wireless modules. Now, as general manager and engineering manager of startup Digital Six Laboratories, he works as a freelance hardware and software developer, using his experience and expertise to help companies bring new products to market.

Sanjeev is currently an MS EE student at San Jose State University, majoring in analog circuit design, and interning at Broadcom on the WLAN DVT team. He likes the circuit design aspect of microcontrollers, and most of his projects involve interfacing the 8051 with LCDs, seven-segment displays, and the like. As a hobby Sanjeev made robot cars for school-level competitions. He hopes that through his blog he will be able to "learn from sharing and discussing ideas related to microcontroller circuit design, peripheral interfacing, and a bit of high-level coding."

Mark Pitchford has more than 25 years' experience in software development for engineering applications. He has worked on many significant industrial and commercial projects in development and management, both in the UK and internationally, including extended periods in Canada and Australia. For the past 10 years, he has specialized in software test and works throughout Europe and beyond as a field applications engineer. Most of this work involves safety critical applications in such as the aerospace, automotive, and medical device sectors. 

Editor in Chief of Microcontroller Central. More than 12 years as an embedded system designer and 25+ as a technology journalist covering embedded systems. BSEE at Univ. of Maryland, MS Applied Physics Johns Hopkins U, doctoral studies in quantum electronics, communications, and computer design.

Nishant Sood is a programming enthusiast who works on innovative electronics projects through his company, Winacro Inc. He has a passion for physical computing and enjoys combining it with personal computing to create innovative solutions that have a wide range of applications and enhance our day-to-day lives, such as remote-controlled lighting and other home automation systems. His coding skills include C/C++ and C#.

Jon Titus works as a contributing technical editor with Design News magazine and writes about measurement techniques and mechatronics. His career includes time at EDN and Test & Measurement World magazines. Before joining EDN in 1984, he designed microprocessor-based equipment and wrote and edited books about computers and electronics. In 2002, Jon received a George R. Stibitz Computer & Communications Pioneer Award from the American Computer Museum (Bozeman, Mont.) for his development of the Mark-8 hobbyist computer kit in 1974. His original computer now resides in the Smithsonian Institution.  He has a BS from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an MS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a PhD from Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Jim Turley is a professional nerd, specializing in microprocessors, embedded systems, and semiconductor IP licensing. His business, Silicon Insider, offers expensive (but worth it!) advice to engineers, managers, and investors working with MCUs and embedded systems. You can follow him at @ChipGuy.

He used to have a real job doing hardware and software engineering for several embedded-systems companies in the US, UK, and Germany. He was president and CEO of a small microprocessor company, and VP of Marketing for another microprocessor company.

Jim is the author of seven books and was the Editor-in-Chief of Embedded Systems Design magazine and Microprocessor Report newsletter. He was chairman of the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC), and the Embedded Processor Forum shows.

Jim has a talented, accomplished, and stunningly attractive wife, two overacheiving children, and an opossum living under the house. He (Jim, not the opossum) is also a licensed racecar driver, competing in the Formula Ford division.