[{"meta":{"title":"Final internship finished","description":"I finished my final internship for my bachelor degree at Aimvalley with flying colours!","date":"2025-02-22T00:00:00.000Z","imagePath":null,"imageAlt":null,"tags":["announcement"]},"path":"/blog/final-internship-finished-aimvalley","postContent":{"html":"

On the 16th of january 2025 I did my graduation session at Windesheim University of Applied Sciences, presenting and defending my research and finished project I did as my internship at Aimvalley in Hilversum.

I graduated with flying colours, receiving a 9 from the graduation committee. The committee consisted of the following people:

Windesheim

Anke Kuijk (main assessor)
Martin Snijder (second assessor)

Aimvalley

Bastiaan van Weerd (first mentor)
Niels Schipper (second mentor)

External

Richard Mijnheer (external assessor)

Many thanks to the committee for assessing my work, Aimvalley for allowing me to work on a amazing project and learning a lot and Windesheim for there support and help in the internship.

The project at Aimvalley consisted of creating a QSFP 100 Gbit/s breakout board for internal use at Aimvalley for testing and taking measurements of QSFP networking equipment.

At the start of the assignment there where was no proper way off connecting testing equipment like BER-testing or high bandwidth oscilloscopes to Aimvalley developed QSFP hardware. The objective of a breakout board is to “break out” all signals of a connector/connection for testing or wiring purposes. For QSFP it meant that the high speed data lines need to broken out to be able to attach testing equipment. Because of the intention to use the product to quantify performance of connected QSFP devices the product it self needed to be as less as a influence on the measurement as possible to be able to take qualitative measurements of the device under test. Besides the most important high speed signals QSFP has also status and programming signals which need to be broken out and which had a major influence on PCB-stackup because of the routing space needed.

The main goals where:

Functional and tested product capable of 25 Gbit/s per QSFP channel for total throughput of 100 Gbit/s
Control of the QSFP status lines
EEPROM for QSFP identification
Testing out Simbeor as a high speed simulation tool and comparing it with Keysight ADS

Extensive testing demonstrated that the product passed, even sometimes surpassed, all the goals, which resulted in a usable product which is being used at Aimvalley.

I learned a lot about high speed networking, high speed/low loss PCB design, simulation of PCB trace structures (with KeySight ADS and Simbeor), project management, and project communication.

References of my work at Aimvalley are available

See also the spring edition of the Aimvalley newsletter mentioning my graduation.\nAnd the celebratory post of external assessor Richard Mijnheer.

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}},{"meta":{"title":"First post, website up and running!","description":"First post to my personal website.","date":"2023-01-22","imagePath":null,"imageAlt":null,"tags":["announcement"]},"path":"/blog/first-post","postContent":{"html":"

First version of my portfolio website is up.

I will use this site as a portfolio and a place to write about my projects and other interesting things I have learned or discovered.\nFor me this website is also a learning experience, to learn about web-development/coding, using Git and services like Cloudflare.

This website uses SvelteKit as its framework, Github for the repository and Cloudflare Pages for hosting.

I am still deciding on a good domain name. Until then there isn’t a direct email address for contacting me, but keep a eye on the about/contact page for updates.

For archival reasons see the image below for a screenshot of the first version of the front page

","css":{"code":"","map":null},"head":""}}]

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