Building the tools before you can build the system

High-throughput fixed-wireless broadband on custom Point-to-Multipoint processors — where the first job was building the assembler and debugger, because none existed yet.

The problem

Redline built high-throughput fixed-wireless broadband systems — both Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint — running on custom processors designed specifically for that hardware. Point-to-Multipoint is the harder case: one base station has to manage many subscriber connections at once, classify and schedule their traffic, and keep it all secure, on hardware that doesn't have the luxury of an off-the-shelf software ecosystem.

Constraints

Custom silicon, no existing toolchain. Standard debugging and development tools don't exist for a processor nobody else has built software for.
Security requirements were non-negotiable. The cryptographic and security modules had to be aligned with FIPS requirements — there's no partial credit for "mostly compliant" cryptography.
Throughput and correctness under contention. At up to 200 Mbps with many subscribers sharing one base station, memory management and packet classification have direct, measurable consequences for every connected user, not just an abstract benchmark.

The decisions

Before any of the higher-level system work could happen, the low-level tooling had to exist: I built the assembler and debugger for the custom Point-to-Multipoint processors, because there was nothing to build against otherwise. On top of that foundation, I architected and developed the memory manager and the packet classification system for the high-throughput P2MP platform, and implemented the cryptographic and security modules aligned with FIPS requirements.

assembler + debugger memory manager + packet classification FIPS-aligned crypto production P2MP wireless system

The tooling isn't the interesting part of the resume bullet, but it's the part nothing else could be built without.

The trade-off

Building your own assembler and debugger before you can build the actual product is time spent on infrastructure with no visible feature to show for it. On hardware with no existing toolchain, though, it's not optional — every hour skipped there becomes many more hours of blind debugging later, on a system where correctness in packet classification and memory management directly affects every subscriber sharing the base station.

Impact

The result was a high-throughput fixed-wireless broadband platform — Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint — supporting data rates up to 200 Mbps in production, with security modules built to FIPS alignment from the start rather than retrofitted after the fact.