SIGMA
AFFILIATES, LTD
BRUCE M. ESTES
Mr. Estes is an engineering consultant specializing
in the areas of product development, machine control systems, embedded control,
data acquisition, system simulation/optimization and also offering practical
design assistance for CE, IEC, electromagnetic compatibility and electrical
safety compliance.
Mr. Estes received a Bachelor of
Electrical Engineering Degree from the University of Minnesota Institute of
Technology and has since accumulated over 30 years of engineering experience
involving positions in R&D, Design, Quality, Product test, and
Manufacturing. With that broad perspective, he has gained a wide variety of
specific and practical "how to" experience in such areas as:
Analog and
digital electronics, test instrumentation, data acquisition, microprocessor
applications and embedded control, machine control, control system
architectures, real-time control systems, state machines, computers and
interfacing
Motion control
with PM, brushless dc, synchronous, stepper, AC servo, and related control
technologies involving precision speed control and positional accuracies down
to the 10 micro-inch level
RF circuit
design, EMC testing, shielding, noise immunity, filtering, PC board
design/layout considerations, power MOSFET circuits and RF techniques, magnetic
components, RF and data communications, analog and digital phase locked loops,
Manchester encoding, Direct Sequence and Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum
technology
Computer Aided
Design software related to schematic capture, circuit design and simulation, PC
board layout, functional modeling of electrical and physical systems, state
machines, feedback control, PID loops, fuzzy logic concepts
IBM PC hardware,
STD bus, STD-32 bus, Compact PCI, and system configuration within the PC
environment. Familiar with various computer software including Windows 95 and
98 Operating Systems, word processing, spread sheets, project planning and
scheduling, Mathcad, PCAD, Accel, StateCAD, Pspice, SystemView, Altera Max+Plus
II
Electronic
sensors including transducer design and circuit design involving acoustics,
temperature, flow, level, pressure and vacuum, optoelectronics, infrared and
visible LEDS, opto-couplers, incremental encoders, semiconductor lasers, fiber
optics
Machine level
power distribution design from 120VAC to 480VAC, single phase and 3 phase, with
power levels ranging from less than 10 watts to more than 100KW
UL, IEC, VDE,
FCC, SEMI and CE compliance issues
In addition to a variety of continuing
education topics, Mr. Estes has obtained Project Management and Leadership
training and also the Mini Master of Software Design and Development training
through the
He is a current Member of the IEEE, a
Member of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association and a Member of the
IEEE Consultants Network of the Twin Cities.
In conjunction with his past work in
electronic circuit design and in piezo electric transducer development, he was
awarded two
