Joseph Allen is a senior hardware engineer at NK Labs who has brought many successful products from prototype to market throughout his career. He has broad expertise at all levels of software and hardware development including analog, digital logic, FPGAs, firmware, device drivers, operating systems, compilers, and applications.

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He has worked on many projects in diverse fields including medical imaging, network appliances, FPGA-based hardware acceleration, embedded systems, and telecom. Joe worked at IBM for ten years in Systems Group where he was the lead hardware engineer for Datapower appliances. In this role, he was responsible for four generations of x86-based web application appliances which included custom FPGA-based application accelerator cards, FPGA-based line interface cards, and cryptographic accelerators. He was also responsible for the related software and firmware including parts of Datapower's XSLT compiler. Prior to that, Joe developed some of the traffic handling FPGAs at Avici, a telecom equipment company which provided AT&T's core internet routers. Prior to that, Joe developed medical image capture cards and embedded systems.

 

Joe is named as an inventor on eight patents and holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Joe was an early contributor to Linux and he developed and maintains a number of open source software projects.