Wade Fife
Principal Hardware Engineer at National Instruments
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWade Fife is a Principal Hardware Engineer with over 8 years in industry and two decades of experience in digital and FPGA-based system design, currently leading hardware development for Ettus Research USRP software defined radios at National Instruments from Austin, Texas. He combines system, circuit, PCB, RTL, and FPGA design expertise—built on a PhD in Computer Engineering—with a strong background in machine vision and embedded computing. Wade is an active contributor to prominent open-source USRP projects (UHD and FPGA repos), where he added features like a DMA-based replay block, 64-bit support, and critical USB and IIR fixes that improve reliability and performance. Comfortable spanning research, teaching, and production engineering, he brings deep verification discipline (testbenches, simulation improvements) and a knack for turning complex DSP/FPGA requirements into robust, tested hardware.
8 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University
English, French
Github Skills (16)
fpga10
embedded10
verilog10
ax10
systemverilog10
sys10
axi410
dma9
signal-processing9
digital-signal-processing9
testbench9
simulations9
simulation9
c-language4
cprogramming-language4
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
EttusResearch/uhd
Jul 2018 - Jan 2023
The USRP™ Hardware Driver Repository
Role in this project:
Back-end & Embedded Systems Engineer
Back-end & Embedded Systems EngineerContributions:1 review, 397 commits, 2 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Wade appears to be a back-end and embedded systems engineer based on their contributions. The user implemented a Replay API and example, added and improved the add/sub features, fixed the flow control, and helped add a new, related block, the fosphor block, to the UHD driver. The user also performed fixes on the IIR filter and provided fixes on the main USB image core files, which are critical to any operation of this USRP.
driverusrphardwaresdruhd
EttusResearch/fpga
Dec 2017 - May 2020
The USRP™ Hardware Driver FPGA Repository
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:114 commits, 3 comments in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Wade primarily worked on the FPGA code for the USRP hardware driver. Their contributions focused on fixing compilation errors, improving simulation time, and adding support for new features, such as 64-bit output and a DMA-based replay block. They modified existing components like axi_dma_fifo and axi_wrapper to include new parameters and functionalities, and added testbenches to verify new functionalities. The contributions are focused on improving the performance, functionality and testing capabilities of the FPGA repository.
xilinxlatticeusrphardwarefpga
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