About the Owner

Steven M. Spano, Biography and Highlights

Steven M. Spano holds a Master Degree in Electrical Engineering (specialization in control systems) and is the owner and Principal Consultant of Finger Lakes Engineering. Steve formed Finger Lakes Engineering in 1999 to provide engineering design services for companies developing microprocessor and FPGA based data manipulation systems.

Background

Prior to forming FLE, Mr. Spano was the Director of Advanced Development for Axiohm Transaction Solutions; a global leader in thermal receipt printing. Mr. Spano led the development of low-cost 2-color thermal printing techniques bringing cost-effective direct color thermal printing to the retail market place. For information on this technology, see the TPG group at this link. During his career at Axiohm Transaction Solutions, Mr. Spano also was a co-inventor of a form of audio-spread-spectrum technology to reduce the acoustic noise of impact printers. The results of Mr. Spano’s innovations at Axiohm produced several industry-first products and a series of US patents on the technology he helped pioneer.

Steve then joined Advanced Digital Information Corporation (www.adic.com) as a Senior Hardware Engineer to help the company develop a series of advanced network data appliances. During his time at ADIC, Mr. Spano was a lead engineer on the design of a 24-channel 10/100 Ethernet backplane, a 6-port 2Gb/s Fiber Channel router, and provided additional support for the development of a PowerPC 440GX based management control unit to coordinate the activities of several Fiber Channel routers.

Today

Currently, Mr. Spano is the Owner and Principal Consultant of Finger Lakes Engineering. Steve and his company have created over 3 dozen various products for companies located in New York, Chicago, California, Georgia, France, and Taiwan. FLE’s products have ranged from RS232<>PS/2 data converters, industrial lift-gate/door control systems, wireless data collectors, 3-Phase AC motor control systems, and multi-gigabit ethernet network appliances.

Steve Spano has also conducted several FLE sponsored or client-specific training courses on Xilinx FPGAs, signal integrity, and approaches to hardware engineering problems.

Mr. Spano’s technical background includes high speed electronics architectures, schematic design, printed circuit board design, design for manufacturability, design for test, and high speed signal interconnections. Steve’s software background includes development is assembly language, C, C++, VHDL, Verilog, Pascal, andForth.

Sole-Inventor Patent List

• US# 6,784,909 - Dot history compensation device for row-to-row and dot-to-dot power adjustment in direct-thermal printing applications as applied to single color and dual color applications.
• US# 6,739,773 - Method for enhancing the appearance and safegaurding sales receipts through real-time image manipulation.
• US# 6,486,902 - Method for improving the appearance of 2-color thermal images via image pre-processing techniques.
• US# 6,404,452 - Auxiliary control device for 2-color thermal printing and image processing.

Co-Inventor Patent List

• US# 6,801,335 - Controlling Impact Printer Noise by modulating input pulse power to spread the harmonic noise envelope of an impact print head and platen assembly.
• US# 7,019,583 - Inrush current limiting control circuit

Publications and Letters in Print

• Achieve Performance Increases and Product Differentiation with the Xilinx Microblaze
  Published in Xilinx Embedded Journal
• Design and Implementation of a Low Cost Multi-Fingered Robotic Hand Using a Method of Blocks
  Published in IEEE Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems