The presentation will be broken into three sections that cover the design of a product at Adtran, Inc. In the first section, issues related to the initial product concept are discussed. These issues include the origination of the concept and the architecture of the product based on this concept. In the second section, issues related to the hardware design and implementation of the product are covered. Resources available to a design engineer at Adtran are presented along with how they are best used. The role of the hardware designer after the initial hardware design is complete is also discussed. In the last section, software design, testing, and support are examined. This includes the software architecture of a product and how that architecture is most effectively converted into a viable software application. Finally, a discussion of the importance of software standards and the role they play in the telecommunications industry is presented.

Phillip S. Herron was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on February 11, 1973. He received the BSEE in 1996 from Mississippi State University. He then received the MSEE in 1998 from Mississippi State University.

He worked four semesters from 1993 through 1996 as a co-op with Adtran, Inc., in Huntsville, Alabama. During this time, he designed a board that supported an ISDN U-interface for an ISDN terminal adapter. He also wrote software to support a two-layer Adtran proprietary protocol scheme for certain Adtran products that were locally networked together.

Since May of 1998 he has been employed by Adtran as a design engineer. He is responsible for the hardware design and much of the software design for the inverse multiplexing option module that works in the multi-service ATLAS platform. He has also helped design software that supports the transmission and reception of voice over ATM in the Total Access 850, Adtran's newest integrated access device.