It seems I have just built the world’s first open source switch ASIC and I am getting it back from the fab mid november.Switch floorplan render with area density view enabled, occupying 711.2 x 325um of area. The first version of this chip
On March 23, 2026 the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made a decision that resonated throughout tech circles when they decided to include consumer foreign made routers on the Covered List, with exception subject to conditional ap…
As regular readers would be well aware I have a thing for terrible ideas. But after an intense schedule working towards taping out my Ethernet switch ASIC my brain was clearly and simply fried. And when a previously closed experimental shut…
Any mistakes that are not caught and fixed before tapeout means an expensive, in both time and money, silicon respin. There is no room for mistakes. Every tapeout must aim for perfection. And as the deadline approaches, so does the pressure…
A few weeks back I was asked a seemingly innocuous question by an friend: In the context of engineering, what do you think people who become genuinely exceptional are usually good at? This friend is still a student, and the vast majority of…
Picture this: you have just submitted your latest change, the tapeout countdown has reached 0 and started going negative, and staring you in the face, smack in the middle of your floorplan is a massive issue.Austin we have a problem ! If th…
For inquiries, questions and casual coffee chats you can reach me at julia.desmazes@gmail.com. ☕ I am currently not in the market for a fulltime job, if you are looking to fill a fulltime position here is a list of diamonds in the rough I h…
There has been an idea lingering in the back of my mind, slowly growing with each passing day. A disturbing sensation entrenching itself page after page. The internet feels empty … I know this feeling isn’t just my own, talk of the “dead in…
I have a confession to make: floating point scares me. Half a decade ago I decided that I was going to implement some floating point arithmetic. Back then it seemed approachable enough, after all, floating points are ubiquitous. How hard ca…
Not because of a job, nor because I have to, but because my ability to build is part of my identity, I develop myself as an individual by expanding the scope of what I can do. Not all projects are created equal, most are small, ranging for
It sometimes feels like I was of the last generation: the last to grow up in a world with a familiar texture, a texture future generations will never know. I was born in 1996, according to society’s conflation of individuals into generation…
How much of what you do is for yourself, and how much is for others? Social pressure is a powerful force. A Mermain, John William Waterhouse (1900)A small subset of minds might truly be immune to its effects, but the greatest majority delud…