Previously, he was the chief technical officer at FTL Systems, a VHDL-AMS tool vendor, as well as a captain at the Air Force Research Laboratory. Dr. Peterson was the program manager for the VHDL-AMS language reference manual development contract, a participant in the VHDL-AMS standardization activities, and chair of the Accellera Users' Group targeting VHDL-AMS and related HDL technologies. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM.