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Education

Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, 1995
The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Thesis Title: Shaped Modulation in Noisy Fading Channels

M.S.E.E., Specializing in Integrated Circuit Design, 1978
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Campus

B.S.E.E., Course work in analog and digital electronics, 1977
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Campus

B.S. in Letters and Engineering
Combined curriculum program with U. of Michigan (above) 1977
Calvin University, Grand Rapids Michigan

Electronic Technician Certificate, 1972
Radio Electronic Television Schools, Wyoming Michigan

Academic Experience

Dordt University, Sioux Center, Iowa, 1984-2021

Joined the faculty of the engineering department August 1984

Engineering Department Chair August 1990-91, organized successful initial ABET visit. (Initial: meaning Dordt's engineering program did not have prior accreditation.)

On leave-of-absence for graduate studies,
August 1991 through August 1994

Engineering Department Chair August 1998 through July 2003

Chair of Dordt's Curriculum and Academic Policies Committee
January 2001 through July 2006

Chair of Dordt's Faculty Status Committee
August 2011 through August 2013

Partial retirement, teaching only one or two courses per semester
August 2017 through August, 2021

Full retirement, August, 2021 through December 2022

Returned to teaching two courses and a lab
Spring semester, January 2023 through May 2023

Full retirement again (anticipated) June 2023

Western Christian High School, Hull, Iowa, 2015-2023

Member of the Board, August 2015-August 2023
Member of the Building and Grounds Committee of the Board,
                                                     August 2015-August 2023

University of Colorado at Colorado Springs,
August 1991 through August 1994

Teaching assistant, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, August 1991 through August 1994

Hewlett Packard Company, January 1979 through June 1984

Designed memory cell array used in 528 and 640 kilobit read only memory chips

Designed redundancy circuits for 128 and 164 kilobit random access memory chips. Click here to see a photo of the RAM chip I worked on. The actual size of the RAM chip is just under 1 cm square (about 3/8" square).

Designed memory mapping circuits for a 32-bit memory controller

The above projects were part of Hewlett Packard's FOCUS 32-bit microprocessor project. The resulting hardware provided the core functionality of the HP 9000 model 500 series of computers.

Designed a cell library for clock driver circuits

Hybrid and Electric Vehicles
Communication Systems, Modulation Theory,
Digital Signal Processing,
Digital Systems, Embedded Controllers
Smart-Grid and Reliability, FNET/GridEye Project (FDM Host)

American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE)
Christian Engineering Society (CES)
Eta Kappa Nu (Inactive Member)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (Senior Member)
    Chair of the Siouxland Section of the IEEE, Aug. 2002 through Dec. 2003
    Region 4 Science Kits for Public Libraries (SKPL) Application Chair,
        August 2019 through present.
Tau Beta Pi (Inactive Member)
Licensed Professional Engineer (Iowa, #P20500)

IEEE EAB Meritorious Achievement Award in
Outreach and Informal Education
Issued by the IEEE Educational Activities Board, November 2023
      For "pioneering and leading the IEEE Region 4 Science
      Kits for Public Libraries program that attracts and inspires the next
      generation of STEM leaders." (quoted from the award)
 
      "The Meritorious Achievement Award in Outreach and Informal Education
      was established in 2006 by the IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB) to
      recognize members, who volunteer time and effort for the informal
      education community, and highlight the benefit that their work provides
      to pre-university and university teachers, students, parents of students,
      and the public. These volunteers will have served in advisory,
      educational, or fiduciary positions and used their professional background
      to enhance understanding and involvement in IEEE’s fields of interest by
      users of the informal education system." (Quoted from the award letter.)
            Video of the award ceremony is available here.
            The relevant portion of the video is from timestamp 59:42 through 1:12:36.
            Here is a screengrab from the video at 1:02:46.

"Best Mopar" (July 2009) and
"3rd place, Late Model Modified Car" (August 2009)
Issued by the Sioux Center Show and Shine Car Show, July 2009 and the Rock Valley "Rally in the Valley Car Show, August 2009
      For the successful conversion of a passenger car from gasoline to
      battery-electric power. This was a Senior Project conducted at Dordt
      University. I was the project's faculty adviser. Photos and details about
      the project are available at The EV Photo Album, page 2761

Siouxland IEEE Engineer-of-the-Year, 2007
Issued by IEEE, Siouxland Section
      For volunteer contributions to the IEEE Siouxland Section as Chairperson
      of the Section.

2006 Merit Award, "Designing a cost effective Brushless DC Motor Controller"
Issued by Lincoln Arc Welding Foundation, Division IV, (2006)
      An award given to a Senior Project completed at Dordt University.
      I was the project's faculty adviser.

Siouxland IEEE Engineer-of-the-Year, 1996
Issued by IEEE, Siouxland Section
      For volunteer contributions to the IEEE Siouxland Section as Newsletter
      Editor for the Section.

I have been a Christian all my life. I was born in a Christian family, attended Christian schools, and generally speaking, socialized in a Christian community. I have two younger sisters, Ruth and Lisa. Ruth is a school counselor, and formerly did computer programming as a consultant. Lisa is a professor of art at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. Our mom, Agnes, lives in Grand Haven Michigan. Our dad passed way in 2013 (obituary).

For two and one-half years, when I was in second and third grades, my parents were missionaries. My dad was a missionary doctor stationed at Takum Christian Hospital in Nigeria. At that time I attended second and third grades at Hillcrest School in Jos, Nigeria. (Alumni page) Hillcrest is a Christian boarding school, mostly attended by missionary kids at the time I attended. Since then it has grown and now serves a more diversified group of students.

Upon returning to the United States my family moved to Grand Rapids Michigan and I attended Christian day schools. I found that I did not exactly blend in with the U.S. culture. My vocabulary and habits were no longer purely American. I had a hard time being "cool." It was not fun, but it has also prepared me somewhat to stand up for others when needed.

When I was a high-school, college, and university student I thought my life-story was kind of short and simple—missionary kid returns to the States and tries to fit in to American culture. But as the years went by, my story grew longer, and continues to get longer. The retrospective view I now have on my longer life-story makes it easier to see God's providence for me and my finiteness.

I did not question my faith much until I attended the University of Michigan. There I met many other people and discovered the extent of skepticism that some people have for Christianity. (I happened to also live next to a Ba'hai temple that catered to university students.) The challenges I experienced at the University of Michigan solidified my faith.

In particular, I really appreciate my reformed roots and the catechisms. I know that we live in a fallen world, full of sin and misery. That explains the origins of troubles and difficulties we all live through. I know that I am personally delivered from my sins, and in response, I want to glorify God with all of my life—including my engineering career. The Lord has equipped me with various gifts, one of which is the ability to do engineering, especially electrical engineering. If I had to live out my vocation simply to earn money so that I could support my family and church, I would feel that my life was split into two parts; work and everything else. But we don't have to live like that. I can use my engineering talent to bring healing and peace to our broken world, to witness to others through my work, and at the same time, the Lord graciously provides for all my other needs, including a community of family and friends around me and a salary to live on.

In the early 1980's I worked in the engineering industry at Hewlett Packard Company (HP). I worked for their "Desktop Computer Division" in Fort Collins Colorado, later renamed the "Systems and VLSI Technology Division." In my first project there I designed the cell array for a 640 kilo-bit read only memory (ROM). Other projects I worked on include redundancy programming circuits for a 128 kilobit random access memory (RAM). You can see a photo of that chip by clicking here. I also designed some standard cells for a library of clock-driver circuits. Most of these projects were for the FOCUS chip set. This was the company's internal name for the set of integrated circuits that formed the CPU and core architecture for the HP 9000 series 500 Unix workstation computers, introduced by HP in 1982. (For example, this HP9000/520 in the HP Computer Museum contains "HP Focus" chips I helped design) When I left HP in 1984 to join the faculty at Dordt University, my division at HP was just beginning the work on the PA-RISC processor. They followed this in the 1990's by partnering with Intel to produce the Itanium processor based on HP's RISK technology.

I found that many of my colleagues at HP were also interested in doing their work in service to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (There are Christians to work with in industry.) At the same time there is the powerful influence of corporate life—a focus on a broadly defined corporate concept of success. (not just profit—corporate success includes community service, a sense of loyalty to customers, employees and business associates, etc.) As a Christian, I sometimes felt strongly called to put my oar in the water and try to participate in setting the direction of that corporate ship, even if only on a small issue. I believe Christians are called to serve and give direction in our world, but we must do this with humility and respect for others since we are all sinners.

In August of 1984 I joined the Engineering Department at Dordt University. The decision to leave Hewlett Packard Company was not black and white. In favor of staying at HP was the excitement of working with state-of-the-art technology in a well-respected company. In favor of Dordt was a sense that I had a special combination of skills and a sympathy for what Dordt wanted to do. After arriving at Dordt, I participated in the initial development of courses in digital logic, microprocessors, and communication systems in the then-new electrical emphasis of the engineering major. I also met my first wife, Susan, through a regional Bible study group during my second year on the Faculty at Dordt University. Susan was a graduate of Alexandria Technical and Community College.

I have been active in the local section of the IEEE as the newsletter editor for the Siouxland branch of the IEEE in 1990 and 1995-2002. In 1996 I was named the "IEEE Siouxland Section Engineer-of-the-Year" for contributions I made to the section as newsletter editor. In August of 2002 I became the chair of the local section of the IEEE. As Chair I initiated an annual Leadership Development Workshop for engineers in the profession. In January 2004 my term as chair of the section expired—the term is limited by the bylaws of the section, but I was glad to have been of service and will continue to participate in professional activities. Professional societies, like the IEEE, are another avenue where I believe Christians have a calling to participate.

In August 1991 I took a three-year leave-of-absence from Dordt University to work on my Ph. D. I did my research on shaped modulation, which is a way to reduce the bandwidth requirement of digital modulation while simultaneously introducing some forward error-correction capability into the signal. Forward error-correction allows perfect recovery of the information in a corrupted digital signal. For example, an audio CD will usually play perfectly even if there are some minor scratches on it because the data was recorded with a forward error correction code. In August 1994 I returned to Dordt University to resume teaching and to finish writing my Ph. D. dissertation. I finished that work in December of 1995.

Research like that is especially rewarding. It brought me closer to God. Modulation theory is quite a mathematical field—and mathematics is the way we represent our understanding of one aspect of God's creation. The new insights I discovered about shaped modulation therefore gave me a renewed appreciation for God's faithfulness to us. It is not obvious to me that my original arrangement of a bunch of theory and equations should be so predictive of what actually happens. God must faithfully maintain the order in the universe to to make mathematical theories so useful! I was the first person in the world to discover some of the relationships in nature that God designed and created. I could talk a lot more about doing basic research like that. . .   Ask me about it some day!

However, God's beautiful universe has been corrupted by sin, with all its ugliness for us to experience. In 1993 my first wife, Susan, was diagnosed with a fatal cancer during the C-section birth of our second daughter. A tumor was removed during the C-section and Susan survived the birth, but the doctors told us that she had only a matter of months, to at most five years, to live. In 1996, three years after our daughter's birth, at age 36, Susan died from her cancer.

Susan's death does not make much sense to me. A wife and mother struck down in the prime of her life would make anyone ask, "what is life all about anyway?" Were it not for my Christian faith I think I would conclude that life is a meaningless struggle. The shorter Westminster Catechism's first question and answer is:

Q1: What is the chief end of man?
A1: Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.

It is our place to be beacons of light in this world, in both our personal lives and our professional lives. Susan glorified God in her earthly life as a wife, mother, artist, and friend of others. That is the significance of her life. All of us find our true significance only in glorifying God.

In 1998 I married Marge. She grew up in Grand Rapids Michigan and went to the same high school I did, Grand Rapids Christian High School, although we did not know each other then. After high school Marge went to Dordt University. She met her first husband at Dordt University. She had four children with him, Lori, Glenn, Keith, and Lisa. They all graduated from Western Christian High School in Hull, Iowa. Lori and Lisa continued their studies in Nursing at Calvin University in Grand Rapids Michigan. Lori is a school nurse for a public school in Michigan. Lisa is a nurse at a hospital in Grand Rapids. Marge's son, Keith attended Western Iowa Technical College and transferred to Bellview University to get a degree in Criminal Justice. Glenn went directly from high school to work. Both Keith and Glenn now work at the Doon Elevator in Doon Iowa. All four of them have found spouses and are married. There are 12 grandchildren on Marge's side of our family.

Marge lost her first husband to a heart attack in 1994. Later, in 1997 about a year after Susan had died, Marge and I were introduced to each other by mutual friends. When we married we each had two unmarried children living at home yet, so we blended our families together.

I have two daughters, Naomi and Kim, from my first marriage. Both of them are graduates of Unity Christian High School in Orange City Iowa and of Dordt University. Naomi also has a master's degree in fine arts from Iowa State University. She now does artwork on commission (see her website), and with her husband sells flowers on the weekends at the Ames farmer's market. Naomi was also a member of Christians in the Visual Arts . (CIVA ceased operations in June of 2023.) Kim went from Dordt University to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, South Dakota. There she earned a master's degree in environmental engineering. She now works for the South Dakota Department of Agriculture & Natural Resources in their Water Rights Division. She lives in Pierre, South Dakota. There are two grandchildren on Doug's side of the family.

At the end of August 2021, I officially retired from the faculty at Dordt University. They made a tribute video upon the occasion of my retirement. One of the retirement activities I'm participating in is the IEEE's "Science Kits for Public Libraries" project." I serve as the Grant Applications Chairperson for this project, a very part-time role. I also volunteer one day a week at Bargain Alley (thrift store) to advise on what to do with donated electronics items.

In my role as a professor it was my desire to lead my students to be first-rate engineers in Christ's service. I expected to offer them a combination of breadth and depth in their studies that helps them ground their engineering talent in their Christian faith. Engineering is a delightfully multifaceted career field in which there are many ways to help people solve technical problems. Before Adam and Eve sinned (the fall), there would have been engineering work in order to develop the potential of the creation. For example, transportation technologies are possible because of the resources provided in the creation. Now, after the fall, Christians can also relieve some of the suffering caused by the fall. For example, hearing aids and artificial prosthesis mitigate the effects of age and disease. Transportation and communication technologies enable us to spread the Good News. I greatly appreciate Dordt University as a place where I have found a concentration of Christians and resources that makes me effective in Christ's service. (Also, Hewlett Packard Company and all my past employers have afforded me opportunities to glorify God.) I hope my students can say along with me, that here in the engineering department at Dordt University we are glorifying Christ, and every day learning to do that better.

D.F. De Boer, "Theoretical Frameworks and Christian Engineering" Proceedings of the 2022 Christian Engineering Conference, St. Paul Minnesota, June 2022-July 1, pp 192 – 205.

D.F. De Boer, "Advertising Engineering: Why Choose XYZXY University?" Proceedings of the 2022 Christian Engineering Conference, St. Paul Minnesota, June 2022-July 1, pp 248 – 261.

D.F. De Boer, "God's Grace in Weights and Measures" Proceedings of the 2019 Christian Engineering Conference, Sioux Center, Iowa, June 2019, pp 119 – 139. (Slides to accompany this paper are available. See "Session 5 - DeBoer. . .")

Riley, Elizabeth; "The Loop: Engineering Project Keeps On Giving" The Voice, Winter/Spring 2013: Volume 58, Issue 2" (2013) page 5

D.F. De Boer, "Using Design Hierarchy in Digital Logic to Illustrate the Scientific Method as a Human Invention" Proceedings of the 2013 Christian Engineering Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, June 2013, pp 99 – 106.

D.F. De Boer, "Peer Grading: Sometimes It Should Be Done" Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education, Minnesota State University, Mankato Minnesota, October 2010.

D.F. De Boer, "Typography Too," Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education, Iowa State University, Ames Iowa, October 2003.

D.F. De Boer, R.E. Ziemer, "Power and Bandwidth Efficiency of Shaped Modulation by Decomposition," MILCOM 96 Conference Proceedings, October. 1996.

D.F. De Boer, R.E. Ziemer, "Power Bandwidth Properties of Shaped BPSK," Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, September 28- 30, 1994, Monticello, Illinois.

D. De Boer, "A Biased View of Things," Christian Engineer's Association Newsletter, Autumn, 1994.

D.F. De Boer, "Polysilicon Link Fusing and Detection Circuit," Hewlett Packard Journal, August, 1983, p. 23. (Or, p. 23 only)

Reviews of projects I worked on at Hewlett Packard appear in these trade magazines:

"Destiny Milestone," EDN Magazine, Feb. 1981, p63.

"Over a Million Devices Make up 32-bit CPU and Support Chips," Electronics Magazine, Feb. 10, 1981, p39.

"ISSCC_The Main Events: VLSI Processors, Fast Static RAM's, Precise Linear IC's," Electronics Magazine, February 24, 1981, p138.

D.F. De Boer, "An Investigation of the Lifting Ability of a Crane," Unpublished Manuscript, 1960. Available: html

D.F. De Boer, "Truth Prevails," In All Things, September 26, 2017.

D.F. De Boer, "The Announcement of the Ten Commandments,"
In All Things, June 2, 2017.

D.F. De Boer, "Anticipating Advent," In All Things, December 1, 2016.

D.F. De Boer, "Technology is Imagination Incarnated," In All Things,
June 10, 2015.

D.F. De Boer, "The Career of Baby-Boomer De Boer," A presentation to the IEEE Dordt University Branch, January 29, 2019.

On May 13, 2019 "Dordt College" changed its name to "Dordt University" The name change was only symbolic. There was no change in ownership, governance, administration, or status of accreditation when this happened. For this reason, all references to this institution in this document are in the form of "Dordt University." However, the reader should understand that prior to May 13, 2019 the institution was known as "Dordt College."

On July 10, 2019 "Calvin College" changed its name to "Calvin University" The name change was only symbolic. There was no change in ownership, governance, administration, or status of accreditation when this happened. For this reason, all references to this institution in this document are in the form of "Calvin University." However, the reader should understand that prior to July 10, 2019 the institution was known as "Calvin College."

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(This page last updated on 8/22/2024