Mr. Alexandre Lopes worked as an R&D Engineer and as an outsourced employee, from 
January 2015 until August 2016, at my department for the development of embedded 
software for Lithograpy Optical Systems of the Company Carl Zeiss SMT GmbH.

The division Lithograpy Optical Systems of Carl Zeiss SMT GmbH develops and produces 
projection and illumination systems for deployment in wafer steppers and scanners 
in DUV (193nm) and EUV (13 nm). These so called litography optics are essential components 
of the wafer steppers and scanners of the company ASML, and determine significantly 
the imaging quality of the template (reticle) on the wafer.

Our optical systems are equipped with innumerous mechatronical actuators and sensors, 
that are used, through special control electronics, for adjustments and customer 
site operation.

To ensure the quality of the produced system, several optical and mechatronical certification 
process steps are made. To that effect, control systems from ASML as well as in-house 
developed control systems are used. The task of my team is to develop embedded software 
for our products, the development and responsibility for its control systems in the 
manufacturing as well as the responsibility for the software of the customer which 
is used for the optical analysis and process control.

Mr. Lopes was outsourced by a staffing company (Personality IT People Power GmbH). 
My requirements were a young motivated physicist, with broad knowledge in order to 
connect my heterogeneous team (due to the broadness of the performed tasks). Technical 
depth was required, since the long-time employees of the team are top-class experts 
in their own field of expertise. Additionally, the candidate should also bring the 
potential for managerial functions, with the objective at a later point of time to 
become a permanent employee to allow the group to grow and be supported by him as 
a manager. From my previous experience, a very difficult mixture to find ...

Astonishingly, Mr. Lopes took this very particular path into my team, and together 
they were able to solve many difficult projects:

In his role as a software architect, Mr. Lopes drove forward very successfuly and 
over 1 year (until his departure) the pre-development and first phase of the main 
development, of a new mecatronical litography component. Alongside the requirements 
management and design, he developded the control and analysis software in Matlab 
and made the analysis of the optoelectrical measurements. With the help of white-light 
interferometry, he researched, together with a team of experts, the static and dynamic 
behavior of the component, which had sub-namometric resolution. The test planing 
and the coordination of the measurements were also part of his work as well as the 
planing of the work package, troubleshooting and the collaboration with an external 
partner and supplier.

Almost simultaneously, Mr. Lopes also worked in the sustaining [of the manufacturing] 
of our litography components. Part of it comprised the installation, configuration 
and support of Solaris servers, maintenance of OS and infrastructure and administration/support 
of the litography applications in Oberkochen and at international clients. Besides 
taking care of solving tricky error cases with our control systems he also provided 
the much necessary and urgent support for our manufacturing.

Due to its excellent software development skills together with his broad know how 
in Physics and his competency to familiarize himself with new topics, Mr. Lopes also 
accompanied the very complex part of the product software development for lithography 
systems. After his initial training in the optimized software sources, which in fact 
could only be understood by 1-2 highly specialized experts, he could create some 
much-necessary documentation  for it, develop unit tests in C/C++ as well as suggest 
concepts to improve the [software] architecture.

The particular broad knowledge of Mr. Lopes also helped, in the context of a Basic 
Task project, to evaluate a new hardware platform with a Cyclone V FPGA/ARM SoC Board. 
For the MitySoM Board of the company Critical Link, Mr. Lopes got the boot [loader] 
(U-Boot) and the system to work with Linux (Preempt-RT and Xenomai) as well as bare 
metal and a mixed system. He also analyzed and optimized the jitter for the several 
variants.

Thanks to his experience with several Linux distributions, Mr. Lopes managed to implement 
an automatized Ubuntu / Xenomai installation with project specific preseeding and 
post-install, in order for the team could have a reliable and common solution.
He also expanded the already available Debian repository server with own packages 
of our own products.

Since the real-time capabilities of the control system is of utmost importance for 
our department, Mr. Lopes analyzed the real-time capabilities of existing Linux frameworks, 
Xenomai, RTAI and Preempt-RT with respect to jitter.

For a control / motion control system running on a TigerSHARC DSP system, Mr. Lopes 
migrated the old software project to a control software framework that was meanwhile 
implemented on a department-wide basis. To that effect, the available C code of the 
embedded DSP system, as well as of the Linux system, in particular the CORBA server, 
were adapted.

Unfortunately and despite my efforts and desire it was not possible, due to economical 
and personal-political conditions, to offer Mr. Lopes, in a timely manner, a permanent 
position in our company, and consequently I couldn't satisfy his wish for long-term 
safety.

I regret this deeply, since I am convinced that an employee like Mr. Lopes, with 
his technical skills, determination, broad interest and sense of responsibility, 
will be difficult to find. What is also significant to me and makes me recommend 
Mr. Lopes even more, is that despite my better offer [in financial terms] I couldn't 
dissuade him from his commitment towards his future employer.

With all the best wishes for his professional life and the hope to see him again.