Books I read in 2025 One of my resolutions for this year is to write more. So far, I’ve done a shitty job holding myself up to that. I have been having a hard time coming up with something to write about. Naturally, writing about other people’s writing is much easier than writing something original. So here are my thoughts on some of the books I read in 2025. February Elder Race Adrian Tchaikovsky This was the first book (novella?

This past semester (Fall 2025), I had the opportunity to take ECE 427: Advanced VLSI Design (formerly known as https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/ECE498HK/fa2024/index.html). We basically get 1mm^2 of silicon (on TSMC’s 65nm node) to tape out whatever we want. I wanted to share my experience and ramble on about the things me and my teammates did. The Grand Idea Timeline RTL, Synthesis and Simulation EDA Tools Handoff and Wrapup

Intro Last November, I got the chance to meet Daniel Genkin - at the Midwest Security Workshop. He is one of the authors/discoveres of SPECTRE and MELTDOWN , some of the most critical vulnerabilities discovered in the last decade. These were also unpatchable due to them being hardware vulnerabilities. Bumping into Daniel was a happy coincidence for me. I was aware that MSW had a section on HW Security (which is why I went in the first place) - but I never knew that such an epic security researcher was going to be there.

This post is about 5 months late. I created the markdown file on 12/23/2025 but never got around to writing anything to it. Now, I have some time on my hands (and I feel bad about not writing as often as I had planned to) - so I figured I will give this a shot again. Last fall, I took ECE 411 the infamous computer-architecture class at my university. This was a class I was really looking forward to.

Super Micro Open Stroage Summit 2024 https://www.thecube.net/events/supermicro/open-storage-summit-2024 I attended the last 2 events at this stummit. Here are my thoughts and notes: The New High Performance Computing: Optimized Storage from HPC to AI Speakers: Randy Kreiser Supermicro CJ Newburn NVIDIA Balaji Venkateshwaran DDN Bill Panos Solidigm CJ- The moderator looks like he is being held at gunpoint. Rate at which usage models are changing need for new infrastructure new models characterized by large scale and making memory accesses of fine granularity

Interactive Demo here Features include Concurrency through RoundRobin Scheduler Interrupt Support, Keyboard IO, RTC Custom read-only filesystem with POXIS(-ish?) syscalls x86_32 Paging exec() and exit() functionality for certain programs For academic integrity reasons, I cannot share the source code This project also has mouse support, soundblasters, and real-time UART pvp TicTacToe implemented for extra credit. Not available in the online demo. This placed 3rd in the Design competition in SP24