Robert Bruce Johnston

Robert@layer2.com

Principal Engineer

Robert Johnston has extensive experience in telecommunication, computer network, and embedded system design at all levels of the product cycle, including development, production, service and support. His experience includes programming in C/C++ and assembly language for Intel, Motorola (Freescale), and Siemens microprocessors.

For the past 4 years he has been working under contract to TeleSoft International (www.telesoft-intl.com) as a key developer of their CompactSIP product.   Along with developing SIP protocol software, he has ported the CompactSIP product running under various RTOSs (VxWorks, Embedded Linux, Nucleus, Window Mobile, etc.) to various hardware platforms (Freescale Coldfire and PowerPC, HP iPAQ, etc.).

He began his telecommunications career with General Telephone's Lenkurt subsidiary designing PCM and data telecommunications hardware. With the coming of the microprocessor, Robert designed an alarm and control unit for the 9004 D4 Channel Bank using Intel's 8021. That achievement was followed by the design of various PCM channel units.

After 10 years with General Telephone, Robert joined Radio Switch, Inc. as leader of a team designing cellular mobile site survey and call test equipment. In addition to managing the team, he was directly responsible for digital hardware and embedded software for the project.

He then took a detour into production management as Director of Operations for Maxitron Corp. He managed the production and inventory department, setting up a production operation with vendor PC fabrication, contracted assembly, and with in-house purchasing, final assembly, testing, and shipping.

Returning to engineering, he extended his software design expertise when he joined Connectware, Inc. to develop OSPF routing software for the TokenMaster routers. As part of the project he added routing features to manage and use the OSPF generated routes. He also added the RIP and ICMP protocols.

He then spent 7 years as part of the Telenetworks design team before starting as an independent consultant. He stated with Telenetworks when it was an independent company, and was with them when they were bought first by Next Level Communications, then Wind River Systems. At Telenetworks he leveraged his hardware design experience by porting the industry standard Telenetworks ISDN Protocol Stack to customer hardware under various real-time operating systems such as VxWorks and pSOS. He wrote board support packages and device drivers for various Motorola and Siemens communications processors. He was also involved in extending and maintaining the various Telenetworks protocol software products. Before leaving Telenetworks, he wrote sections of the new SIP, MEGACO, and MGCP protocol software products.