Detailed CV for Nigel Bromley

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Milton Keynes

FFEI Ltd 2006..

FFEI was formed in 2006 by a management buy-out of Fujifilm Electronic Imaging.

I am currently employed as a Technical Integration Manager, working on industrial inkjet printers. My principal project is the Caslon digital printing module for the Nilpeter FA-series label press. FFEI supply the inkjet system for this module, including all the mechanical, electronic, software and ink supply systems, based around the Xaar 1001 printhead and an FFEI-branded UV ink. This has been a technically challenging project, not so much in producing a working system as in solving the many problems relating to reliability and image quality that come from the interaction of printhead, ink and substrate.

More recently I have been re-engineering the industrial inkjet systems for the new Graphium press.

Fujifilm Electronic Imaging 1997..2006

From 1989 Crosfield became jointly owned by Fujifilm and Dupont. In 1997 Dupont sold their interest to Fujifilm and most of the assets and staff were transferred to a new company.

Consultant up to 1999; then Technical Integration Manager.

AMIS. A scanner to digitise the whole of a microscope slide in sufficient detail to allow diagnosis without further reference to the slide. I was involved with this only in the early stages of concept development and prototyping of novel opto/electronic/mechanical systems. This project also required us to start the risk assessment process necessary to market a medical device.
Integration functional development. Development of a company process for the integration function.
Patent compliance work. Organising searches and studying patents to prove no obstacles to marketing various scanners.
Inkjet PCB manufacture. Integration of a flatbed inkjet printing platform using various Spectra (now Dimatix) heads and mostly bought-in parts with our own software. The platform was used to experiment with inkjet printing of resist onto printed circuit boards, but failed to achieve adequate resolution, and process reliability with the available fluids was poor.
Fujifilm Lanovia Quattro. A development of C-550 into a lower-cost desktop form, using a bespoke CCD from Fuji. Sold well, but not as well as its bigger and more expensive predecessor. This was the end of the line for graphics arts scanners, as digital origination was becoming the norm.
Microscan 580. A small scanner for a specialist application inside a life sciences company's cell-counting machine.
Fujifilm Lanovia C-550 and Agfa XY-15. A floor-standing flatbed CCD scanner that was more of a sucessor to Maxtel, but made much better than Maxtel would have been by incorporating the experience of Celsis 360. A very successful product in the marketplace.

Crosfield Electronics 1984..1997

Principal Electronic Engineer up to 1990; then Consultant.

An important part of this phase of my development was learning techniques for concensual, multi-disciplinary concept generation and design. They can be used to develop an efficient project team without conflict, they reduce the risk of clearly wrong design decisions, they foster right first time. Often such processes are accused of wasting time. The scanner projects I worked on at Crosfield demonstrated that this is just not the case, and some more recent projects where the systematic approach has been maligned and ignored have shown what can be lost.

Celsis 360. A desktop 60mm slide scanner. An odd market choice forced on us by corporate rivalries between the owners of Crosfield. Our first CCD scanner to make it to market, and a good learning experience.
Maxtel. Our first flatbed scanner, which didn't make it past the prototype stage before Celsis 360 was forced on us instead.
Klischograph simulator. A rackful of electronics to test Gravure Plus 2000 in the absence of an engraver.
Gravure Plus 2000. The application of the real-time imposition hardware from Lasergravure onto our competitor's mechanical engraver. It worked well, but the competitor did not like it.
Lasergravure development. Alongside the electronics development, I was involved in the system design for parts of the engraver, particularly the methods for stabilising the laser.
Lasergravure new electronics. Lasergravure was a suite of machines to replace copper gravure printing cylinders with plastic-coated ones. I joined the project to lead the process of updating the control electronics including real-time imposition and bus-based control of the complete system. The job was done and tested, but the plastic was never made hard enough to survive the press and the project died. Full story

Jeaborough 1981..1984

Jeaborough was a small design consultancy based in Milton Keynes. In its short life it created many products demonstrating how productive a small focused team can be. Those that I was involved with extensively were:

The Tycom Microframe personal computer. I designed the interface cards for the hard drive and the display adapter including writing the embedded firmware. I was involved more generally in the inital concept generation and the integration and testing.
A Telephone Data Interface. My part was an 8748-based tone generator module and some of the process of getting approval for connection to a PABX network.
A Speech Storage System. This was a later component for the Telephone Data Interface allowing storage of an announcement which could then be made on multiple phone lines asynchronously.
A Telephone Wake-up System. This was a software package written in Pascal for Apple II that was intended for a 600-room hotel. It used the Telephone Data Interface and the Speech Storage System to replace operators on the hotel switchboard when the manual switchboard was replaced by a PABX. The hotel was adjacent to Heathrow airport and often had large numbers of wake-up calls booked for the same time.
An Apple II IO card to provide a number of functions required in a custom hotel reservation system, including a system and real-time clock and a buffered printer interface.

Decca Radar 1975..1981

This was the part of Decca Radar that specialised in military products for the UK and other governments. My contributions were:

Assisting the design and testing of analogue thick-film circuit modules for an airborne application: a fast amplifier and a follow-and-hold.
A semi-automated test box for a module of an airborne system using digitisation of signals and discrete ALU and sequencing circuits to produce results directly on LED numerical displays.
Software in BASIC for early HP desktop calculators running automated test via HP-IB connections to custom and standard test equipment.
The Feasibility Study and Product Definition study for a new submarine system. This was mostly deskwork, editing reports and communicating with the customer, while others did some basic experiments. I also ported a large FORTRAN program for modelling radar propagation from batch on an IBM mainframe to interactive on a minicomputer.
Design of the first prototype of this system. I was responsible for the front-end digital radar pulse analyser, a set of six PCBs with TTL, bit-slice processors, microcode sequencers and storage. Later improvements included a microprocessor-based (6802) pre-filter and a writeable control store. I was also involved with the main software team, which was provided by an external agency, in specification and monitoring. I had two junior designers with me on this module.
Testing of the prototype at a coastal naval base and also during a naval exercise in the North Sea.

Education

University of Bristol 1972..1975. BSc in Physics (1). Stage III Project Prize for project on Oscillatory Magnetostriction in Zinc and Antimony.

Kingston Grammar School 1963..1972. O-levels in Mathematics (1); Further Mathematics (3); English Language (1); English Literature (3); French (4); Latin (2); Physics (1); Chemistry (1); Biology (1); History (6). A-levels in Physics (A); Chemistry (A); Mathematics (A). S-level in Physics (1).

Various summer holiday jobs working for Decca Radar.

Patents and applications

US 8,319,829 / EP 2120080 (A1) Method and system for controlling the position of a microscope lens
US 7,271,099 Forming a conductive pattern on a substrate
US 6,999,205 Image projection systems
US 20050158668 Method of forming a mask pattern on a substrate
US 20050122364 Inkjet printers
US 20030227562 Multishot camera
US 20010030774 Method and apparatus for controlling scan conditions
EP 1531051 (B1) Improved points for ink jet printer
EP 0822701 (A1) Method for generating electronic expression for original image and device therefor

nib 2003-01-30 .. 2018-12-27

nigel by himself

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