Sixteen Cameras and One FPGA: Inside the Engineering Projects of Stan Schekall

SANTA CLARA, Calif. One of Stan Schekall's favorite projects started life as a development board and ended up as a handheld camera about the size of a cell phone. It carried 16 high performance cameras. With a single press of the shutter, a field programmable gate array inside stitched all 16 images into one very large, very high resolution picture.

That project is typical of the work at GF Hi Tech, the Silicon Valley product development company Mr. Schekall has led since 2016 as chief executive officer and engineering project lead. The firm designs circuits, lays out printed circuit boards, writes embedded software and develops FPGA logic, and he is involved in each of those steps on a daily basis while keeping clients informed on every job.

Displays are a recurring specialty. GF Hi Tech has built an ultra high definition display controller and a line of controllers for LCOS, LCD and LED micro displays, along with the controller boards, daughter cards and flexible circuits that connect them. Mr. Schekall has said that moving that much data across a flexible circuit was the hardest part of the job.

Other projects are built to survive harsh conditions on a tight budget. The firm designed the embedded controller for a medical grade centrifuge that governs temperature, speed and time, and an extremely low cost board that runs bare metal code at military temperature and voltage ranges.

Power is another theme. On a battery management and FPGA power control system built around a Xilinx Kintex device, the goals were to stretch battery life with fast on and off power switching, stop processor crashes caused by power glitches and shrink the board by miniaturizing its regulators. A separate prototype, a smart heater vent, combined Bluetooth Low Energy, a ZigBee mesh network, a stepper motor vent actuator and thermoelectric energy harvesting, with the aim of a battery that never needs replacing and a network that covers an entire building.

Test equipment is a large part of the client list. GF Hi Tech has written custom Verilog for Xilinx Zynq systems that includes 16 frequency counters running up to 250 MHz, a 128 pin input and output cross point switch and 128 bit pattern matching. It also built a low cost 160 channel, 100 MHz automated test board running embedded Linux on dual ARM cores, with secure network storage for test data. A rigid flex circuit for a LiDAR sensor head rounds out the portfolio.

The skills behind these projects were built over a long career in chip design. Mr. Schekall began in 1988 as an ASIC engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company and moved to Seagate Technology in 1992, where he earned a 1995 U.S. patent for correcting header information in magnetic disk drives. He went on to ASIC work at Intrinsix, now part of Cadence Design Systems, and contract work for Qualcomm from 2002 to 2005, where he developed a GPS ASIC module for cellphone chips. He then served as a senior staff engineer at Nano Integrated Solutions and, from 2008 to 2016, at Evans Analytical Group, now Eurofins EAG Laboratories, building AVR, ARM and FPGA based test systems.

His education pointed in the same direction. Mr. Schekall holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and his graduate work focused on image processing and digital communication, the same areas that drive his display and camera projects today. He is a senior member of the IEEE and has written technical articles published through the institute.

Clients describe a stubborn problem solver. "Stan grabs on to new problems with study and diligence and doesn't let go till it's solved," Craig Stuber wrote on the GF Hi Tech website, adding that he "is also fun to work with and lightens the working atmosphere."

Looking ahead, Mr. Schekall expects artificial intelligence to take over more of the control of electronic systems, and he intends to keep designing the hardware that makes that possible.

Dynamo Times recognizes Stan Schekall for a body of embedded systems and FPGA work that turns demanding technical requirements into compact, reliable products.