During the Spring 2021 semester, I conducted reasearch into FPGA prototyping of RISC-V SoCs with Karl Hallsby. Specifically, during the course of this project we setup and experimented with the Chipyard SoC design framework and the Xilinx Arty A7-35T FPGA in order to generate SoCs with dynamically configurable IO.

During the 2021 Summer semester, I have remained at Illinois Tech to work on the development team for the Idea Shop Safety Quiz and WebApp (https://ideashop.iit.edu). This project entails utilizing the Flask Web Development Framework to implement shop safety training and live status information for the Idea Shop.

For this project, I followed along a laboratory from Carnegie Mellon University, course 18-447 (Computer Architecture). This laboratory specifically entailed designing and implementing a Single-cycle MIPS processor using Verilog. To accomplish this, I first drew a basic datapath diagram to help guide my design.

This project required me to implement several basic Unix utilities using the C programming language. Implemented utilities include: cat, grep, zip, and unzip. Zip will be altered in a subsequent project to implement multithreading in order to improve efficiency.

In this laboratory, I utilized Cadence Virtuoso to implement a layout cellview for a unit inverter. This required determining the correct size of the NMOS and PMOS transistors based on the FreePDK45 design process library, conforming to all design process rules, and then verifying the functionality of the layout by using Calibre Layout vs Schematic (LVS) verification.

For this project, a 2-input NAND gate was designed and implemented in Cadence Virtuoso, and its performance characteristics were examined by utilizing SPICE simulations. The data obtained from the SPICE simulations were then tabulated, and examined to determine the effectiveness of using logical effort to to measure the propagation delay of the gate.

In this project, I utilized Cadence Virtuoso and Formality ESP to design and test a 2-input AND gate. This gate was created using a 2-input NAND gate and an Inverter, both of which were created as independent cells.