Happy New Year! Welcome 2023.

I have been tremendously fortunate this year (and past several years). At work, no big moves, have landed into a routine over at Google. Not a bad thing and no complaints. For Tensor G2 announced earlier this year, my primary focus was on its camera hardware.

Post-COVID, I needed to get back into the world. I traveled to Belgium on a whim. For Fall 2022 semester, I volunteered as a Leadership Coach at SJSU UNVS 101 on behalf of Braven non-profit. My role was to facilitate weekly sessions of the Braven Accelerator course. It was a great experience, great people all around. I am thinking of returning next fall. Looking forward to further community engagement next year.

What's Been Up?

I can finally broadcast what I've been working on since I shut down my company at the end of 2018. I have been at Google working on:

https://blog.google/products/pixel/introducing-google-tensor/

For Tensor GS101, I primarily worked behind the scenes as lead, then manager, of a design verification CAD team. I later switched to a design verification lead role for YouTube's Argos ASIC, specifically on the video codec IP written using C++ and synthesized using HLS. Following some reshuffling, I continue doing the same, but for something different, still 100% confidential. Hope to talk about it soon!

Mid-January Update

November was mostly about writing a grant proposal for DARPA.  It has been 110% technical work since then.  Beginning in February, I will shift to writing pretty PowerPoint slides for the company.   I should have a minimum viable prototype by then.

I worked on an experiment to build a continuous integration environment for the software assets of the RISC-V Foundation; learning Groovy and Gradle the process.  The prototype uses Jenkins2 for which I have been pleasantly surprised.  My previous experience was Jenkins 1.x.  I published source code for the prototype here.  I plan to volunteer some time to help coordinate some this activity.  It is a small <5%-of-week commitment.

I began to move parts of my internal wiki to GitHub gists.  I plan to add more over time.

Finally, I am accumulating notes on how to bootstrap RocketChip.  You can find the notes here. 

Also, compared to six months ago, I am beginning to feel very comfortable writing functional code using Scala.  I struggle a bit here and there (i.e., when recursion comes into play), but overall it is a positive experience.  If I had time, I would love to take an advanced class.  It would be interesting to re-learn data structures, algorithms through a functional lense.

Early November update: DARPA, GCE, open source release

It has been a busy few weeks, and it is not going to get better in November.  No big deal because I am enjoying startup life. My biggest challenge is to not work too much.  I am in the process of applying for a DARPA research grant for the company

I have been looking to scale my design environment to the cloud.  I followed a friend's recommendation and eval'ed Google Compute Engine. Wow! I was up and running in seconds.  I intended to buy an additional workstation to serve as a build server, but the $20,000 in free startup credits have me thinking otherwise.

I open sourced my design environment to support the effort.  Here is a link to the public repository https://bitbucket.org/ecote/nade.

Here is a picture of an FPGA that I produced.

I also recently subscribed to Grammarly.  I am incredibly impressed.