Joe Jacob (President)

Joe Jacob has 20 years of hardware product development and management experience in embedded mil/aero and telecom companies. Mr. Jacob received his Bachelor of Science in Electronic and Computer Engineering from George Mason University. Before co-founding Quasar Systems in May 2004, he spent the previous seven years working for Curtiss Wright Controls (formerly Dy4 Systems) in various roles including hardware development manager, technical product manager, and a member of the Technology Innovation Group. Mr. Jacob was responsible for architecting many of the products for the Dy4 DSP Center of Excellence including the CHAMP and StarFabric families of products. He was responsible for representing Dy4 in a variety of industry standards organizations including VITA, PICMG, StarFabric and RapidIO trade associations. Mr. Jacob has authored several articles related to DSP embedded systems, FPGA technology, and switched fabric interconnects. Previous work experience includes a variety of board, Xilinx FPGA and ASIC designs for telecommunications companies such as Alcatel Data Networks, IgT (PMC Sierra), Transtream and PulseCom.

Scott Walker (Vice President, Engineering)

Scott Walker has over 22 years of architectural definition, engineering design and management experience in aerospace / military and telecommunications environments. Mr. Walker received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. Most recently, he has been responsible for Dy4 Systems flagship Single Board Computer (DMV-182) including architectural definition, project management, and detailed design. Prior to Dy4 Systems, Mr. Walker was a founding member of Advanced Switching Communications (ASC). In his role as a Principal Design Engineer and then Director of Hardware Engineering, he was responsible for the product definition, hardware architecture, detailed design, infrastructure, processes, staffing, and development. Previous work experience includes all levels of product development within the communications environment. There, he was responsible for product definition, architectural definition and product implementation.

Tim Cooper (Vice President, Software Development)

Tim Cooper has been developing real-time embedded software for commercial and military applications for over 20 years. Mr. Cooper has authored numerous device drivers, board support packages, and signal processing applications for real-time-operating systems. Mr Cooper has also authored high-performance signal processing libraries based on SIMD architectures. Much of Mr. Cooper's experience involves software development for systems having hard real-time requirements and deeply embedded processors, where software reliability, performance, and latency are significant cost drivers. Such systems typically require innovative embedded instrumentation that collects performance data without competing for processing resources. Mr. Cooper holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Sciences and a Master's degree in Computer and Electronics Engineering from George Mason University.

Jeff Nicoll

Jeff Nicoll has 21 years of hardware development experience. Mr. Nicoll received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering Technology from Virginia Tech. His recent experience includes a design to maintain Sonet timing alignment between physically separated systems, a Sonet VT1.5 insertion and extraction device for internal testing, and a Motorola PowerQUICC-based design for Ethernet and T3 front end for a Sonet interface. Other recent work includes development of a SHARC-based controller for an imaging satellite and a DVB (Digital Video over Broadband) interface. Most recent designs have required significant Xilinx or Altera designs. Recent employers have been Tellabs and Ocular Networks. Prior to that, Mr. Nicoll was a founder of NovaEDA, a successful contract design group, much like Quasar Systems. Earlier experience includes several Motorola CPU-based designs for Netrix and Alcatel Data Networks.

Herb Hopkins

Herb Hopkins has over 20 years of hardware development experience with extensive concentration in digital board design and FPGA design, both verilog and VHDL. Mr. Hopkins received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics (double major) from the University of Maryland at College Park. His recent experience includes a Freescale (formerly Motorola) PowerQUICC III based board for VME, including the VHDL design of two Xilinx Spartan-III FPGA's and a Xilinx CPLD, and the Verilog design of a Xilinx Spartan-IIe FPGA interfacing to four PowerPC processors, Flash, and NVRAM. Mr. Hopkins has been consulting since 1996 with clients such as Tellabs, Curtiss-Wright, and Mercury Computer Systems. Early designs include the development of an entire line of very successful D4 channel banks, wide-area network switching designs, and numerous board and FPGA designs for echo-cancellation products.