International travel to hand off the design to other companies:
Once the reference design was complete and fully tested, I was part of a small team of engineers that traveled to three different high-volume manufacturers in Asia who were gearing up to produce their own cameras based upon our reference design, using our camera chips. I had never traveled in Asia before, so this was a very interesting experience. While we spent most of the time working, we did generally have evenings free and we were gone for a total of two weeks, so there was some time to explore :)
One was located in South Korea, and we were visiting there during winter. Here are a few pictures from the South Korea portion of the trip:
Next, we visited a company in Taiwan (and one of our team members was raised in Taiwan, so we got to explore even more of the city of Taipei):
One of the places we saw was called 'Snake Alley' because they sell, among other things, live snakes, and other things related to snakes (I will spare you the details, but if you are interested, Google 'snake alley, taipei' if you want to learn more).
Finally, we finished the trip visiting a company in Singapore. Although it had been snowing in South Korea, it was a tropical 85 degrees with high humidity in Singapore which is near the equator:
This job came to an end when Intel hired a new Vice President who happened to come from Kodak. Kodak already had a design group that was developing a similar camera, so Intel decided to cancel this internal camera reference design and the whole camera chipset idea, which did not make the three Asian manufacturers very happy, especially as they had already sunk a lot of money into tooling up for production runs assuming these chips would be available from Intel.
When the digital camera group job ended, I was 'redeployed' which is how Intel lays off employees whose position has ended. The way they handle this is better than other companies: when I was laid off at Motorola, then confiscated my badge, gave me a classified debriefing and kicked me out of the building and I was told to come back after hours to be escorted in to clean out my personal belongings. But at Intel, even if your position is no longer required, they still want to retain you as an employee so when you are redeployed you are given 2 months to find another position within Intel and you still have your desk and access to all company equipment...much better and more professional :)
By this point, I was ready for a change, and had been enjoying the hobby programming I was doing at home and the programming tasks that were part of my previous jobs, so I decided to change to software engineering, and there was one very interesting job - a posting in Intel Labs in a group that was exploring different ways new Intel products related to entertainment could be developed to expand Intel's markets beyond computers.