Wires, Chips and Cybersecurity - A Tale of an Electrical Engineer
My career at ZF has been a journey of a growth and innovation. Starting with a summer placement, I progressed through various roles, contributing to projects in automotive electronics, steering systems, vision systems, and cybersecurity. Now, as a Senior Technical Specialist, I continue to lead complex projects across the company.
Early Sparks: A Childhood Fascination with Electronics
I started engineering young! When I was about 4 or 5, my dad made a board with some screw terminals, a battery, a lamp and a switch. He gave my brother and me a small screwdriver and some lengths of wire. We had to make the light work. At the time, I thought this was the best thing ever!
Then on my 10th birthday, my parents got me a book of electronics projects. In the afternoon we went to our local electronics shop - a grotto full of electronic items, and a counter-top of assorted components. We bought a carefully selected bunch of components, enough to make a crystal set and a burglar alarm. We even splashed out on one (and only one) of those new-fangled (and expensive!) *green* LEDs! Building the crystal set was a transformative experience – learning to solder the parts onto stripboard and then hearing Radio 1 without any batteries, using the bedsprings as an aerial! That was me hooked. I went through my teenage years amassing more random components, breadboards, and even an old analogue oscilloscope. I also learned to program the family computers (a ZX Spectrum and an Amstrad CPC6128).
At university I studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering, during which I wrote a small assignment about automotive electronics. My tutor had link to Lucas, and suggested that I should apply for a summer placement. I was successful and spent 10 weeks over the summer working on simulations of electric power steering (which at that point was not a product, just a research project) and was offered a job to start the following year.
Professional Career Path: From Lucas to ZF
After an inauspicious start (I let the magic smoke out of one of the boards I was working with on day 1) I expected to spend 2 or 3 years at Lucas. Career progression, at the time, appeared to be "move into project management and, if you are lucky, department management". Thankfully, things did not work out like that! The department I worked in became an internal consultancy and (as a result) I have spent the rest of my career working on such a variety of projects across the company that I have not felt the need to move. New and interesting work has continually been available to me. The company names have changed - Lucas, LucasVarity, TRW, Northrop Grumman (after they bought TRW), TRW Automotive (after Northrop Grumman spun us off again) and finally ZF - but the interest has remained.
Martin Thompson, Senior Technical Specialist, UK
Pioneering Projects and Technologies
My career as a technical contributor has developed throughout. I have been given more complex and interesting projects as I have grown as an engineer. I have been incredibly fortunate to be working on the leading edge of so many products, from steering systems to radars and vision systems. In fact, I wrote the low-level image-processing code for the very first vision product that TRW sold (called T-CAM, before we started working with Mobileye and created the S-CAM family).
S-Cam 4.8 151
I did the PCB layout for the challenging high-speed sections of the 3rd generation camera. As well as product-connected activities, I was given the fun task of developing (from scratch) a multi-processor FPGA board which our consultancy used for a variety of embedded system tasks. I got to design the electronics, layout the PCB, write the low-level software, write some device drivers, bring up Linux and (in one project) make a Bluetooth link to a mobile phone (that was harder than it sounds, back then!) - a different kind of full-stack engineer! Since 2015, I have worked on product cybersecurity topics, which has given me the chance to develop a lot of new skills and knowledge and have an influence that spreads to large sections of the company. I enjoy pragmatically finding the sweet-spots of the right types and levels of cybersecurity controls, when balanced against the constraints of the projects that they have to be implemented in.
Lifelong Learning
Throughout my career, the company has provided me the opportunity to grow technically, without taking on people management roles. Now I am a senior technical specialist, studying part-time for a PhD (which I am very grateful for ZF's support with!) as well as taking part in a wide range of cybersecurity related activities touching products all across the business's product lines. I am very much looking forward to what the future holds in ZF, if the past is anything to judge by, it will be more exciting times.
