Bringing up Baby - product development thoughts
After months of defining, specifying, and designing, Gene Breniman finally reaches the first semi-functional prototypes of a new product. He walks through the practical steps that get a board from idea to bring-up, from picking parts and laying out the PCB to inspecting assemblies and verifying firmware with low-level tests. Along the way, he shares hard-earned lessons about component availability, incoming inspection, and catching mistakes early.
VHDL tutorial - Creating a hierarchical design
Complex VHDL files quickly become hard to read and maintain. This tutorial demonstrates how to break a design into reusable entities by building a divide-by-10 component, explaining ports, sensitivity lists, and the inout usage for a toggled output. It then shows how to instantiate and chain three instances into a ÷1000 divider, with synthesis notes from compiling to an XC2C128 device.
VHDL tutorial - combining clocked and sequential logic
Need the ADC clock to sometimes be the raw 40MHz input? Gene Breniman shows how to extend a reloadable, counter-based VHDL clock divider to support a master-clock pass-through by using a conditional signal assignment to switch between the internal ADCClk and Mclk. The article also covers remapping ClkSel values and includes a working XC2C32A CPLD build that leaves room for future enhancements.
Small business tackling big jobs.
A part-time engineering job quickly turned into a full-time scramble when the original engineer had to drop out and the project was far behind schedule. Gene Breniman describes the reality of stepping in, stabilizing hardware, fixing buggy software, and learning the business side of running a small company along the way. It is a practical look at how technical work, client expectations, and reputation can collide in a startup-sized operation.
Great men in my life.
This is a personal remembrance of three men who shaped Gene Breniman’s life and engineering career in very different ways. Through stories about Ron Borrelli, Nabil Garas, and William Young, he reflects on mentorship, trust, family, and the kind of leadership that makes people want to do better work. It is a heartfelt look at how the right people can change both a career and a life.
VHDL tutorial - part 2 - Testbench
In this follow-up Gene Breniman builds a VHDL testbench in Xilinx ISE, showing how to generate a continuous master clock, apply a power-on reset, and sequence register strobes to change clock divisors. He walks through timing waits and observation delays needed to verify ADC clock rates. The article also shows how simulation exposed a copy-paste bug in the original design.
VHDL tutorial
Gene Breniman presents a hands-on VHDL walkthrough for a programmable clock divider implemented on a Xilinx CoolRunner CPLD (XC2C32A). The example shows how to declare ports and internal signals, implement a clock-division process with reset and falling-edge detection, and create a simple addressable latch to select clock rates from a 40MHz master clock. It’s a compact, practical guide for embedded engineers learning VHDL and CPLD design.
No, I'm not retired!
Gene Breniman is not retiring, he is doing something much harder, trying to launch a product while building a business from scratch. In this short personal note, he explains why the jump from a paycheck to self-employment finally made sense, and why his family still thinks it sounds like retirement. The reality is long days, side jobs, and plenty of uncertainty, with embedded work only part of the story.
Will work for tools!
Some engineers collect parts, Gene Breniman collects tools, and he makes a strong case for why they matter. In this personal piece, he traces that mindset back to his grandfather’s basement shop, where a love of building and problem-solving took root. From free FPGA tools to scopes, logic analyzers, and home-built test gear, the post is a reminder that the right tools can shape both a career and the products you ship.
Software Prototyping
Software prototypes can save a lot of pain during bring-up, and Gene Breniman argues they deserve a place in the development process. He revisits an earlier post, then points readers to Jack G. Ganssle’s article on creating software prototypes, where test code becomes the model for the real product software. It is a short but practical reminder that early code can do more than just validate hardware.
Size matters - System success depends on initial design
A seemingly small UI choice can reshape an entire embedded system. Gene Breniman uses a real product example to show how picking a graphic touchscreen instead of a character LCD can multiply CPU, memory, OS, and licensing needs. The post explains why capturing requirements early and planning for growth paths keeps complexity and cost under control, and how to size hardware to fit real needs.
Bringing up Baby - product development thoughts
After months of defining, specifying, and designing, Gene Breniman finally reaches the first semi-functional prototypes of a new product. He walks through the practical steps that get a board from idea to bring-up, from picking parts and laying out the PCB to inspecting assemblies and verifying firmware with low-level tests. Along the way, he shares hard-earned lessons about component availability, incoming inspection, and catching mistakes early.
No, I'm not retired!
Gene Breniman is not retiring, he is doing something much harder, trying to launch a product while building a business from scratch. In this short personal note, he explains why the jump from a paycheck to self-employment finally made sense, and why his family still thinks it sounds like retirement. The reality is long days, side jobs, and plenty of uncertainty, with embedded work only part of the story.
I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.....
Gene recounts swapping startup plans for paid work to support family, taking an evening teaching role and then a full-time engineering job. He rediscovers the satisfaction of hands-on embedded design on an ARM9 system with FPGA/CPLD, learns which parts of entrepreneurship drained his time, and decides to keep his product work low-effort while finishing current projects. The post blends career lessons with practical engineering enthusiasm.
Great men in my life.
This is a personal remembrance of three men who shaped Gene Breniman’s life and engineering career in very different ways. Through stories about Ron Borrelli, Nabil Garas, and William Young, he reflects on mentorship, trust, family, and the kind of leadership that makes people want to do better work. It is a heartfelt look at how the right people can change both a career and a life.
Lightweight hardware abstraction
Hardware pin reassignments turned a small firmware tweak into a tangled mess of #ifdefs and scattered port references. Gene Breniman shows how a lightweight hardware abstraction, implemented with per-board include headers and meaningful macros like MODE_LED and LED_ON, cleans up the code and makes it easy to target multiple prototypes. The post emphasizes keeping changes local to configuration headers to reduce validation scope and maintenance.
A part of history
At KVHS's 40th anniversary Gene Breniman reflects on how a tiny 100-milliwatt AM experiment grew into a high-power FM station and a launchpad for engineers. He credits teacher Ernie Wilson's hands-on mentorship for turning students into builders, and laments the loss of his high school's electronics program amid budget cuts. The post is a personal reminder why practical tech education and resourceful projects still matter.
Small business tackling big jobs.
A part-time engineering job quickly turned into a full-time scramble when the original engineer had to drop out and the project was far behind schedule. Gene Breniman describes the reality of stepping in, stabilizing hardware, fixing buggy software, and learning the business side of running a small company along the way. It is a practical look at how technical work, client expectations, and reputation can collide in a startup-sized operation.
A true pioneer passes away... A farewell to Ritchie.
Dennis Ritchie's work on C and UNIX quietly shaped the tools we use every day. Gene Breniman recalls becoming a convert after reading Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language and how C replaced assembly in his embedded projects. This personal farewell explains why K&R remains a near-biblical reference for many engineers and why Ritchie's influence still matters.
Software Prototyping
Software prototypes can save a lot of pain during bring-up, and Gene Breniman argues they deserve a place in the development process. He revisits an earlier post, then points readers to Jack G. Ganssle’s article on creating software prototypes, where test code becomes the model for the real product software. It is a short but practical reminder that early code can do more than just validate hardware.
A part of history
At KVHS's 40th anniversary Gene Breniman reflects on how a tiny 100-milliwatt AM experiment grew into a high-power FM station and a launchpad for engineers. He credits teacher Ernie Wilson's hands-on mentorship for turning students into builders, and laments the loss of his high school's electronics program amid budget cuts. The post is a personal reminder why practical tech education and resourceful projects still matter.
Size matters - System success depends on initial design
A seemingly small UI choice can reshape an entire embedded system. Gene Breniman uses a real product example to show how picking a graphic touchscreen instead of a character LCD can multiply CPU, memory, OS, and licensing needs. The post explains why capturing requirements early and planning for growth paths keeps complexity and cost under control, and how to size hardware to fit real needs.
Bringing up Baby - product development thoughts
After months of defining, specifying, and designing, Gene Breniman finally reaches the first semi-functional prototypes of a new product. He walks through the practical steps that get a board from idea to bring-up, from picking parts and laying out the PCB to inspecting assemblies and verifying firmware with low-level tests. Along the way, he shares hard-earned lessons about component availability, incoming inspection, and catching mistakes early.
I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.....
Gene recounts swapping startup plans for paid work to support family, taking an evening teaching role and then a full-time engineering job. He rediscovers the satisfaction of hands-on embedded design on an ARM9 system with FPGA/CPLD, learns which parts of entrepreneurship drained his time, and decides to keep his product work low-effort while finishing current projects. The post blends career lessons with practical engineering enthusiasm.
Great men in my life.
This is a personal remembrance of three men who shaped Gene Breniman’s life and engineering career in very different ways. Through stories about Ron Borrelli, Nabil Garas, and William Young, he reflects on mentorship, trust, family, and the kind of leadership that makes people want to do better work. It is a heartfelt look at how the right people can change both a career and a life.
Small business tackling big jobs.
A part-time engineering job quickly turned into a full-time scramble when the original engineer had to drop out and the project was far behind schedule. Gene Breniman describes the reality of stepping in, stabilizing hardware, fixing buggy software, and learning the business side of running a small company along the way. It is a practical look at how technical work, client expectations, and reputation can collide in a startup-sized operation.
No, I'm not retired!
Gene Breniman is not retiring, he is doing something much harder, trying to launch a product while building a business from scratch. In this short personal note, he explains why the jump from a paycheck to self-employment finally made sense, and why his family still thinks it sounds like retirement. The reality is long days, side jobs, and plenty of uncertainty, with embedded work only part of the story.
