Acoustic Imaging, in Phoenix, AZ.
1995 - 1996
Electrical Engineer
After leaving Orbital Science Corporation, I found a job at Acoustic Imaging, a company which designed and manufactured medical ultrasound imaging equipment.
Acoustic Imaging had been experimenting with special design techniques which increased the dynamic range of the system so that clinicians could see finer detail in the ultrasound density images, and had designed and produced a few prototypes of a very high end machine that was being used in the U.S. and Europe for breast-cancer research studies.
The problem was that this machine cost about 6 times what an ultrasound machine usually cost, so the company set out to design a new machine from scratch that would incorporate some of the new design ideas, but in a way which was closer to the usual price point (while retaining most of the technical and medical benefits). I was hired along with a few other engineers new to the company for this effort.
Things I did...
(click an assignment for more details)
- Circuit Board design and testing for the Color Doppler Analog Signal Processing board
- SPICE software modeling of new transducer circuit element ideas
The reason I left this job...
Acoustic Imaging was a great place to work! Unfortunately, I only worked here for a little over a year. In that time, we went from concept to design and prototype construction of all of the circuit boards in the new ultrasound machine design. Each board, including my Color Doppler Analog Processor board had been individually tested and all the issues worked out and we were about halfway done with the 'system integration' where the boards are connected together into the full ultrasound machine system.
But one day when I showed up to work, I was shooed into a conference room with about 10 of the other design engineers and told, "everyone outside of this room is being laid off today". Acoustic Imaging was owned by the Daimler-Benz corporation - a German company that is mainly known for owning Mercedes-Benz, and most of this company's subsidiaries were transportation related. There was an economic downturn in Europe at that time, and Daimler-Benz had decided to sell off all of its non-transportation related businesses, including Acoustic Imaging, which was being purchased by a competitor ultrasound company, mainly so they could terminate this design project.
We were told we could stay for up to 3 months to help document the current state of the design, but then we would be let go as well. The kicker was I found out that my wife was pregnant with our first child the night before this announcement, so it was critical that I find another job immediately, because this was before the Affordable Care Act was law, so insurance companies were still allowed to deny insurance to people if they had pre-existing conditions.
This meant that I needed to find a company quickly, and one that had little or no delay before medical coverage benefits started, because we would have to wait for my wife to go to an Obstetrician and be 'diagnosed' as pregnant until we had insurance, otherwise the costs related to the delivery or any complications would not be covered. (And it turned out to be a good thing I was able to find another job quickly, because my wife did have issues and was on bedrest for about 10 weeks at the end of the pregnancy - thankfully, both she and my daughter ended up being fine, but her delivery and monitoring ended up costing around $100,000 that we would have had to pay in full if we did not have insurance.)