Charlie Smith

Working towards PhD in electronics and nano-fabrication. Spending my free time on random projects with electronics and programming.

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Experiar SoC

Ongoing

Designing a system on a chip (SoC) for fabrication through the efabless MPW-6 free shuttle using the Skywater 130nm PDK. This features dual custom designed RISC-V cores with VGA, UART, SPI, and PWM peripherals. This project looks focuses on learning asic design, along with what goes into designing a SoC.

The design has been completed and was selected for fabrication, which should be completed late 2022.

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Experiar

Ongoing

Designing and building a RISC-V cpu using CMOS logic ICs. The hardware will consist of stacked PCB layers containing functional blocks of the cpu. This looks into designing, simulating, building, and testing a cpu that follows the RISC-V instruction set architecture.

An initial system design has been completed, along with hardware design for the ALU and layer emulation. However, assembly and testing of these is incomplete.

16-bit Computer

Completed

This project aimed at designing and building a basic 16-bit computer with a custom instruction set. Hardware uses TTL logic similar to the 8-bit Ben Eater design. Additionally, a simple compiler was created allowing programming from C like code.

While some features of this where not completed, the cpu was able to function at a basic level.

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Naveris

Ongoing

Designing a self flying quadcopter. This predominantly looks at the design of the flight computer and flight software, as well as the use of STM32 microprocessors. Further work could also include a custom motor driver, and cameras and LIDAR sensors for proximity detection.

The flight computer has been designed and mostly build, with flight software still to be completed. Currently the chip shortage means that the sensors are unavailable.

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Bluetooth AoA Direction Finding

Ongoing

Designing a system for direction finding using Bluetooth AoA sensing. This looks at using NRF52 microprocessors along with RF PCB design. This system could be used for camera tracking, or position finding with multiple base stations.

A prototype system has been build, but issues with the RF portion seem to prevent it from working correctly.

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