A proper job!

I've been working at Sharp for three weeks now, and all I can say is, "Wow!"

It's a pretty amazing place: I park my bicycle next to two giant tanks of liquid nitrogen, there are sets of breathing apparatus on the walls, the place has a high-level cleanroom, and there are laser warning strobes above half of the doors. I keep on being reminded of when I used to play Half-Life a lot...

I turned up on the first day, expecting loads of administrative stuff and not even to have a desk until the afternoon. To my suprise, the first thing I had to do was to unpack my brand new workstation with a 19-inch flat panel monitor onto a huge desk in my development team's offices. My personal space at work is nearly as big as our sitting room at home! I've now succeeded in getting a good set of GNU tools installed on my computer, thanks to Cygwin.

I've done two mini-projects so far: one involved making some printed circuit boards (PCBs) and the other was an investigation into Dickson charge pumps, a type of (very inefficient, we found) DC to DC convertor.

I started my big project on Thursday, so in the next few months I've got the joys of learning VHDL, playing with FPGAs, designing some very complicated circuit boards, and then hoping it all works...