End of the summer holidays

End of the summer holidays

So, this is my final blog whilst still officially a second year! I’m heading back down to Southampton tomorrow and then I’ll definitely feel that year three has started! The beginning of the year is always an exciting time – new people to meet, new societies to join and of course new modules to study. I’m looking forward to starting work on my third year project also; I am going to be designing and building an Arbitrary Waveform Generator, which is basically a more advanced version of a signal generator that can produce any type of waveform you could care to think of. This could have uses in modelling the output of a biological sensor, for example, that may be non-standard in appearance. Commercial products that do this do exist, but they are very expensive – I’ve seen products with similar specifications to that I am aiming for retailing at about £50,000! In contrast, I have a budget of £80. Hmmmm. I’m very confident that it’s possible though and I’ll be keeping you updated on my progress throughout the year. Wish me luck!

Last time I posted I was two weeks into my placement at Analog Devices. I’ve now finished and I can say with all honesty that I had a great time and really learnt a lot. I successfully completed the processor and managed to create a design that was about 6 times faster, 8 times smaller and 22 times more power efficient than a similar product from ARM that was used previously. Not bad in 6 weeks! In my last week, I also had to author a complete design review, a document which details fully all aspects of the design and technical decisions I had made. This should put me in good stead for when I have to write up my third year project! Finally, I had to put together some sales and marketing materials and a business case for my product. This culminated in a business and technical pitch to the whole office, which was a daunting prospect, but in fact went well and the idea and execution was very well received which was great! I’m looking forward to keeping in touch with them throughout the year to see if it gets taken up and with a bit of luck actually fabricated. It’d be great fun to go back and experiment with it on some silicon!

Lastly, to those of you reading this who are moving down to Southampton this coming weekend for the start of your uni-life, then I know you’re going to have a great time! Just be yourself, and most of all, enjoy yourself. I’m helping out at Jumpstart on Monday so I look forward to meeting some of you then!