Tier One Management

Tom Tooley - Partner

Tom has almost 20 years of in-depth experience as a lead design engineer, designing well over 100 unique PCBs. Tom has worked with NCR, LXE, Radiant Systems, Avalex, Rockwell Automation, Movaz, and many other companies smaller in size. Tom has been a team lead and senior engineer for the past 17 years and he has also managed the projects encompassing most of his designs. Tom has excelled at the management of aggressive schedules, and at Radiant Systems he led designs for retail point-of-sale electronics that went from concept to mass production in 6 months.

Tom's expert skills span almost all disciplines of electrical engineering: Digital design, analog design (including power supplies), audio and communication systems, FPGA design with Verilog, VHDL, ABEL, and schematic capture. He develops technically superior products that also include testability, TCO, design for parts availability, and design for manufacturing. Among many others, Tom has designed 56Kb modems, NTSC encoders, MPEG video distribution systems, and RF terminals.

Tom has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Notre Dame. Tom is an inventor on eight US Patents, including 5,790,792 . When he is not designing, Tom enjoys running and his family, including his two children.

Aaron Bilger - Partner

In his 10 years of professional experience, Aaron has worked as a software developer and architect for Intel, Compaq, Radiant Systems, and Listman Home Technologies. His work has spanned software development disciplines ranging all of the way from assembly to high-level web development tools. Aaron has led software development teams prior to Tier One while remaining heavily involved in the technical details and contributing directly as a developer.

Aaron spearheaded the software engineering effort required to move Radiant Systems to Windows CE, and in his work there and elsewhere has developed custom Windows CE platforms for over 20 MIPS, SH3, and x86 based devices. Aaron has also implemented firmware on many deeply embedded devices using PICs, 8051s or other small microcontrollers. At Listman he developed a .NET web-based portal and e-commerce system, and has since architected other database-intensive .NET enterprise and web application software. Aaron has developed several custom networking and communications protocols. These have served purposes such as the performance of remote method invocation and allowing thin, embedded devices to be proxied as Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) devices.

Aaron has excellent experience in several assembly languages, C, C++, C#, .NET, TCP/IP, UPnP, multithreaded development, Windows CE, XP Embedded, and device driver and kernel development. He is also proficient in other areas including SQL, XML, COM, HTML and scripting languages. Outside of tools and general development areas, Aaron has specialties in optimization and debugging and working around low-level problems in third party products. Past optimization work has included increasing the network throughput of a Windows CE based multimedia thin-client twentyfold, decreasing the time for a wireless PocketPC to discover automation devices in the home from 60 seconds to 5, and speeding SQL queries for site log data by two orders of magnitude.

Aaron has found and worked around dozens of major bugs in third party binaries and integrated circuits, sometimes enabling products to ship months before fixes from the respective third parties have been made available. Instances include CE network stack crashes, XML parser deadlocks, NT COM initialization deadlocks, PCI bus controller issuing invalid cycles, and a 32bit processor pipeline stuffing issue where instruction execution results could be lost.

Aaron has a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and MS in Computer Science from Purdue. He is an inventor on two US Patents.