Andrew Kopnoff

I was born at St. Petersburg, near Finland, and spent my varsity years in St. Petersburg Polytechnic University to attain the Master of Electrical Engineering. I chose to live and work in New Zealand.My professional life is made of the following key facets: embedded design, software development, and research in fundamental physics. The key interests in each area are as follows.· Embedded Design  o Current projects.    – Create a low-cost custom-design microcontroller (system-on-chip type ASIC).      ~ Flexible architecture (task-dependent hardware sets).      ~ Multi-core.      ~ High voltage, high current peripherals.· Software Development  o Current projects.    – Write an electrical circuit simulation package that does not suffer from the limitations of professional packages available currently (NI Multisim, Simscape Electrical add-on of MatLab).      ~ The main limitation of the current packages is in the fact that they use algorithms that were originally designed for a human (Norton’s theorem, Thevenin’s theorem, etc.). These are very often troublesome for a computer to interpret leading to its inability to evaluate even moderately simple circuits.      ~ The above points at the fact that it is necessary to create a computer suitable algorithm that could be applied to circuits of any topology and complexity.    – Design a hardware-based software protection system.· Researching and Teaching Physics  o I enjoy, beyond words, teaching and investigating the subject.    – I have the ability to “dig out” matters that many other authors “walk over” in the rush of the day, and thus to weave a coherent story that, above all, makes sense and where things naturally follow one another.    – This creates a lesson that students (and the general public) listen to with unfeigned interest and attention.    – I specialise in helping students to not skim over the topic but to get a deeper insight into it paying particular attention to the so-called trivia (e.g. “What is mass?”; “What is force?”; etc.). It is this insight and the depth of investigation that makes it really exciting for the students and for me.