Introduction
Halloween season has already started in New York, you can really see decorations and festivity everywhere. The trees are also slowly turning to their fall colors, as visible in the image above. However, the last couple of weeks have been more filled with school work for me. In this post I will talk a bit more about those assignments and projects. Luckily, on my free time, I still try to do some fun stuff, so I will also catch you up on that!
Project Work and Assignments
Let’s start by talking a bit about System-On-Chip Platforms. This course gives us about one assignment every two weeks, varying in size. The pen and paper exercises do not take much time, but we also got one big programming assignment already. The task was to implement a convolutional neural network layer accelerator in SystemC. Since this was the first assignment on SystemC, we could luckily still use non-synthesizable code. Even so, this proved to be a challenging task, because some concepts had not been fully explained in class and reading the reference book on SystemC was certainly required to reach a working solution. Therefore, it was of course very rewarding to see all tests complete successfully after all that hard work.
For Millimeter-Wave IC Design, the professor gives us an assignment most weeks. These all consist of pen and paper exercises, theoretical derivations and a small part on simulating a concept that had been hand calculated before. Those assignments have mostly taken me quite some time to complete, since their theoretical level can be high, but I have to admit that they are extremely educational. I have certainly learned a lot from actually doing derivations myself, thinking about possible simplifications and then verifying them by computer simulations.
Principles of RF and Microwave Measurement doesn’t give us assignments, but this course contains a big project that falls early in the semester. The deadline for the final PCB submission was actually just last week. I am happy to report that it just got approved for production. The circuit is a 2.5 GHz bandpass filter, using only lumped components. This limitation proved to be very challenging, since every parasitic is important in comparison to the sizes of the components, required at this high frequency. Therefore, the circuit had to be designed in multiple iterations, to account for all parasitic effects of the PCB implementation, including final full electromagnetic simulations.
My last class, Power Management ICs, luckily doesn’t give us too much work. There was only one homework task, were we have presented two papers to the rest of the class. The project however, is yet to start.
Rafting Trip
During the first weekend of October, I went back to Boston to spend a day with my cousin. After a day of walking around in the city, I joined her to go white water rafting in the Deerfield river in Massachusetts. It was my first time rafting and apparently this was a class IV rapid, but luckily the guide was amazing, and it was a great experience. I would certainly recommend it! As you can see in the picture below, I was thoroughly enjoying it.
Day To Day Life
Most regular days here however are not that eventful. I spend a lot of time in the labs, libraries or at home working on assignments or going to class. Most weekends, we go to a bar with friends or we do an activity like mini golfing for example. This weekend, on October 28th, it was sunny and 28 °C, so obviously a day like that couldn’t go to waste. Therefore, I spent the day in Governors Island, having a nice walk and enjoying the peaceful environment. On the main lawn, there was an event where children could carve pumpkins. That was very cute to see! Here’s a picture of the island:
Last weekend already, I went to a Halloween party, which was very fun (certainly after a big project deadline). I knew that it’s an important holiday in the United States, but I wasn’t expecting events to start around half October already! Now the time has come for me to go back to studying, midterms are almost there.
See you next post!