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Our technical writers are engineers and programmers. We understand the technologies that we write about. Technical WritersThe following people write technical documents or provide technical consulting services for clients. Click a name for details about background. Forrest Warthman Rob Johnson K.D. Smith Dan Solis Margi Ference Martin Morf
Forrest Warthman
During his career, Forrest has designed and led the development of several hardware and software prototypes and products, including a cost-accounting application marketed in cooperation with Microsoft, a hardware and software prototype for a flat-panel handwriting I/O system, a file-conversion application and operating system for the IBM DisplayWriter, two audio synthesizers based on Intel neural-network chips, and several Java animations. Forrest received masters' degrees in city planning and architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. His city-planning thesis was on telecommunication networks, written under the mentorship of Prof. John R. Whinnery, then dean of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, and published by the University of California at Berkeley. His architecture thesis was on transportation networks, written under the mentorship of Prof. Harmer Davis, founder of the University's Transportation and Traffic Engineering Department. Forrest received his B.S. in Design at University of Michigan, a degree category that was created for him by the University. Rob JohnsonRob Johnson is an engineer and technical writer specializing in
consumer-electronic product development. He has written many technical and developer documents for graphic processors, I/O
chipsets, wireless network devices, process development, and software-quality
engineering.
Before joining Warthman Associates, Rob worked at Intel where he
developed software for new chipsets including the Intel®810
graphics and early Centrino™ wireless products. He architected
and coded the video-capture drivers and interrupt subsystems for
the graphics chipsets as well as bringing up the hardware. He also
authored protocol-analyses and architecture proposals for Intel’s
integrated wireless products. He was directly responsible for developing
and writing programmer’s reference manuals for multiple chipsets,
training materials for software-process improvement and innumerable
reports, proposals, and other engineering documents, as well as leading
product-development teams for Linux drivers. At GTG Productions,
Rob created software for enhanced CDs that included disc and audio
control and installers for such artists as David Bowie, Brian Eno,
and Todd Rundgren. He also developed programmable high-performance
ignition systems for Yamaha jetskis and an audio mixer plug-in for
Macromedia Director®. Prior to GTG Productions,
Rob developed toys for Hasbro®, Lionel®,
and Chase Toys, including a GI Joe playset and the TrainMaster® Command
Control system which was debuted at the Asilomar Microcomputer Conference.
Previously, he was chief engineer for C & K Systems’ System238™ Residential/Commercial
Security Panel, developing the hardware, software, and communication
architectures as well as the product requirements, user’s guide,
and product datasheet. Rob attended Virginia Tech and Hayward State Universities before receiving his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Nevada, Reno. He has also taken coursework in program management, Linux driver development, software-development life cycles, patent development and product branding and trademarking. Rob is a cycling enthusiast, having ridden all over the world including the 2003 Tour de France route. K.D. SmithMr. K.D. Smith has a long and distinguished career designing and developing digital and analog electronic circuits and systems, teaching electrical engineering, and authoring technical publications. He has written about system-on-chip products, Internet and LAN chips, DSPs, workstations, peripherals, ASICs, medical devices, test devices, and measurement systems. Prior to joining Warthman Associates he worked at Hewlett Packard, where he led the electronic design and development of the FireHawk workstation and a SCSI disk controller for an Internet server, including the architecture, system, logic, circuit and board design, bread-boarding, test-software modifications, and analog and digital testing. At the U.S. Air Force he led the design and development of F16 and F4 aircraft weapons systems using Xilinx FPGAs and VHDL tools. He was a senior scientist at Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), where he designed the logic and layout of a GaAs chip used to verify DSP devices, and he performed architectural, logic, and circuit analyses of microprocessors for deep-space in-flight diagnostics using a scanning electron microscope. At the University of Utah, he designed analog CMOS cells for a mixed-signal simulator, and he designed an artificial-heart control system using embedded controllers, ASICs, and analog devices. He also taught undergraduate and graduate electrical engineering and computer science courses, for which he received the University's Outstanding Electrical Engineering Teaching Award, and he served on the EE/CS curriculum committee for establishment of a Computer Engineering degree. Prior to that he worked at American Micro Systems and National Semiconductor, where he designed custom and standard-cell chips for LAN control, disk control, satellite-TV descrambling, high-speed graphics, CRT control, medical-device control, and IC testing. He has published refereed journal articles, conference papers, and company publications on many of his research and development projects, including his LAN chipset, artificial heart control, and VLSI testers. He authored two textbooks, the JPL/NASA ASIC Guide and General Instrument's MOS LSI Design. He holds two patents on IC-test and microcomputer design. K.D. received his B. S. and M. S. in Electrical Engineering from Utah State University, followed by Ph.D. coursework in electrical engineering at Stanford University and the University of Utah. Dan SolisDan Solis is an expert C and C++ programmer. His broad programming experience ranges from applications to systems-software development on Windows, Unix, handheld, and real-time platforms. He has designed and coded object-oriented and conventional programs for database, finance, supply-chain management, graphical user interface, satellite tracking, and training applications. He has also written compilers, decompilers, and operating-system services. He is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), and has developed and taught training seminars in object-oriented programming and system administration. His 2006 book, Illustrated C# 2005, presents the C# programming language in a unique visual way. Prior to joining Warthman Associates, Dan developed software for a U.S. Air Force satellite tracking and information system at Lockheed Martin, coded a supply-chain management product and graphical user interface for PeopleSoft, converted a mainframe database system to a three-tiered business-object architecture at American Student Assistance, and developed commercial-airline mail-routing software for the U.S. Postal Service. At Microsoft Consulting Services, he implemented groupware using Microsoft Exchange Server. At Fidelity Investments, he co-developed the object architecture for a retirement-portfolio planning system and a graphical user interface for a financial instruments reporting system used by fund managers. He also helped develop a Fidelity financial-calendar system used by trading programs, porting the software to Windows NT as a DLL. He was one of the major architects at Computervision for a bill-of-materials application, producing the object-oriented analysis and design, as well as coding a prototype and documenting the design. For four years, he developed and taught technical training seminars and workshops in the U.S. and Europe on C and C++ programming, object-oriented analysis and design, and Unix and Windows tools and system administration. He was a software engineer at DEC, GenRad, and Hughes Aircraft, where he developed database, compiler, and real-time process-control software. He has programmed in Visual C++ with Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) for Windows and PocketPC, Microsoft SQL Server, WIN32 API, Unix, and Linux software environments. Dan received his Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He received his Bachelor’s degree in English and Biology at Westmont College. For his master’s thesis, he developed a symbolic executor-compiler for Pascal that cross-compiled Pascal source code into Lisp. Margi FerenceMargi Ference is an electrical and software engineer, and a versatile writer and editor. She has written technical manuals about reconfigurable processors, system-on-chip Internet-appliance processors, 3D graphics software, chip design and simulation, chip packaging processes, and chip layout software. She has programmed online help functions and tools for VLSI design and manufacture. Prior to joining Warthman Associates, she worked as a technical writer and programmer at IC Editors, a developer of IC layout and design-rule verification software, where she wrote manuals about general-purpose VLSI layout products and programmed add-ons to the layout software in C++ and a macro language. At FastSURF, a developer of 3D surface-modeling software for defining spline and curves surfaces, she wrote manuals about the surfacing CAD software and programmed online help functions. Prior to that she worked at IBM for eight years as a software engineer. Her responsibilities included the development of software for custom VLSI chip design and manufacturing, including design and programming of a CAD and simulation environment running on workstations and hardware simulators. She wrote code in C and C++, using object-oriented programming concepts. She also documented the software tools she developed and trained users within IBM. She provided programming support for VLSI design synthesis on an IBM/VM operating system, and she had overall responsibility for computer verification of physical design data for custom VLSI parts in an IBM/MVS environment. She created several sets of design documentation for VLSI designs, and she wrote programs to automate many tasks in an IBM VLSI testing laboratory. Margi received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University. In addition to her professional accomplishments, she is the mother of two children. Martin Morf
Martin is currently a Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he serves as co-director of the Stanford Computer Architecture and Arithmetic Group and is on the consulting faculty of the Computer Systems Laboratory. Prior to this he was a full professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where he specialized in informatics and served as co-director of the Institute for Integrated Systems; full professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Yale University; and visiting professor at several institutions including NASA/Ames Research Center, Stanford University's Center for Integrated Systems, Xerox PARC, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and ETH Zurich's Institute for Control, Institute for Biomedical Engineering, and Institute for Mathematics. He has also conducted research projects for Canon Research America, Xerox PARC, RCA, and Chevron Research. Early in his career, he served in the Swiss Army Signal Corps. He has authored or co-authored over 250 publications, including recent publications on reconfigurable and adaptive computing, photonic modulation and routing, computing-system optimization, estimation theory, nanotechnology architectures, and speech modeling. Martin received his Federal Diploma in Electrical Engineering at
ETH Zurich, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Stanford
University. He also received an
Company HistoryWarthman Associates was founded by Forrest Warthman in 1973, in Berkeley, California. In 1974, the company relocated to Palo Alto to better serve clients in the Silicon Valley computer industry. Today, the company is focused on the documentation of semiconductor and computer-system products, and it has provided writing services to most of the world's major developers and manufacturers in these areas. A list of past projects can be found at www.warthman.com/projects.htm. Through the groundbreaking years of the personal computing and networking industries, and their transition from time-share computing, Warthman Associates helped create many of the most widely used technical manuals and data sheets. The company served industry founders like Burroughs, IBM, and Control Data in time-shared mainframes; SRI International in the ARPANET (the early Internet); Varian, Branson, and Tencor in semiconductor processing and test equipment; Fairchild, Signetics, AT&T Bell Labs, and Xilinx in custom and field-programmable logic design; Zilog, Intel, IBM, and AMD in microprocessors; GRiD (the first general-purpose laptop computer), Convergent (the first general-purpose personal workstation), Atari, and Apple in personal computers and workstations. In the field of software, Warthman Associates served early developers like Metaphor in enterprise databases, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in large-system simulation models, and Johnson Controls in large-system control. The company has also programmed database applications for clients as well as protocol-conversion, project-management, and Java applications for its own commercial development. More recently, Warthman Associates has served a growing number of spin-off and startup companies that are becoming world leaders, like MIPS, Conexant, Tensilica, and PMC-Sierra, as well as well-established European and Pacific-rim companies like Philips, Siemens, NTT, NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Mitsubishi. PhilosophyWe believe that well-written documents benefit companies in at least four ways:
No one reads technical manuals for fun. Most people use them like they use doctors—as a last resort to solve problems they themselves cannot solve.
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Forrest Warthman founded Warthman Associates in 1973, and he continues
to lead writing projects as a principal writer, editor, and project
manager.
He
has personally written a large percentage of the documents listed
on the 
Martin
Morf is a member of Stanford University's Electrical Engineering
research faculty and an expert in the theory of information, control,
estimation, and computer architecture. He is active in research on
smart photonic networks, parallel and adaptive computing, specialized
coprocessors (fluid-flow, communications, real-time control, and
DSP), micro-MRI informatics, brain imaging, electro-optical and quantum
devices, sub-nanosecond arithmetic processing, and information-preserving
transformations. He has participated in a wide variety of research
projects, most recently in projects that bring together the disciplines
of biology, information technology, microeletronics, and physics.
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