As technology continues to advance, businesses from every industry are racing to use it to their benefit. Robotics can automate tasks that have previously required hours of repetitive work, providing innovative solutions that save businesses time and money. But while technology is advancing at a rapid pace, it takes a lot of work to design those systems and implement them into the everyday functions of a business. Many of these devices require extensive design, testing, and troubleshooting to make them viable. Companies need the expertise of good hardware engineers to boost their reliability, improve safety, and reduce warranty and service costs.
These are a few of the reasons that Ujjwal Sharma was first drawn into the world of hardware engineering. With a fascination towards physics and electricity from a young age, by high school, Sharma was already taking courses in physics, chemistry, and mathematics to develop a bridge between science and technology. Science exhibitions were a yearly occurrence for Sharma, which soon gave way to writing his own software and building devices and electronic circuits.
Upon graduating from the Manipal Institute of Technology with a Bachelor's of Engineering in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Sharma was presented with two choices: follow his college friends into the field of IT and Data Analysis, or become an electrical engineer.
"I had a passion towards saving lives," says Sharma, so he entered the hardware engineering fields and began working with minimally invasive therapies, surgical medical devices, and research projects in human-computer interaction. He quickly progressed towards cardiovascular devices, working on hardware design in implantable pacemakers and implantable cardiac defibrillators. Building upon his knowledge with training programs, seminars, and a quickly-growing portfolio of projects, Sharma soon moved to the computer networks and hyper-cloud observability industry to pursue his passion for high-speed design.
"My devotion to electrical and hardware engineering is continuous because there are so many potentialities and domains in these industries," says Sharma. His journey makes clear the breadth of the electronics industry, as he took an onsite embedded systems course at Sofcon India Pvt. Ltd. and an online course at the University of Texas, Austin. After that, he went as a contract employee at Medtronic while earning his MS from the University of New Haven.
"I provided technical guidance to design the entire EMI/EMC station to an offshore team in Asia," says Sharma. "I had the complete knowledge of signal generation test limits that reduced the cost of the capital equipment budget. The skills of system-level design, software requirements, and cable management aided the rapid development of the project."
In his role at Getinge as a contractor, Sharma accomplished a $1.9M annual hardware cost savings target and achieved a successful execution of Test Protocols to test the functional blocks in PCB assemblies. He spent two years as a contract electrical engineer at Getinge, then another two years as a contractor at Abbott Labs before his current role at cPacket Networks. With his decade of industrial experience, it's his distinguished skills and widespread knowledge in electronic design, supplier quality engineering, and the development of low-cost solutions that separates him from others in his industry.
"The choice of low-cost assembly suppliers and selection of an adequate number of test equipment can save millions of dollars in mass manufacturing and product development organizations," says Sharma. According to Sharma, his mission is to use robotics to automate repetitive procedures and adopt lean manufacturing and digital manufacturing to reduce overall production costs. He also works towards helping organizations implement quality management systems to achieve a high level of quality control and improve customer satisfaction.
When dealing with hardware as important as a pacemaker or other medical device, it's important to have an experienced, trustworthy engineer working on the equipment. Hardware engineers like Ujjwal Sharma are hard to come by, but they're pioneering this new frontier.
