Embedded Systems & Firmware Engineer
Preferred name: Mark
Embedded Systems · Firmware · Robotics · FPGA
I build low-level hardware/software systems across embedded firmware, robotics, PCB bring-up, and digital hardware.
Primary hardware and embedded systems work across PCB bring-up, digital hardware, and robotics.
01Custom Embedded PCB & Firmware
01 / Embedded Systems + PCB
Designed and brought up a custom SiWG917 PCB, recovered a blocked `.rps` programming path through J-Link/SWD, and integrated CMSIS-RTOS firmware, MQTT networking, and LCD/joystick interaction.
02
PCB layout evidence from the custom SiWG917 board design.
03
Fabricated and assembled custom PCB — front view.
04
Power-rail validation during board bring-up.
02 / Digital Hardware
Six-stage RV32IM processor in SystemVerilog with AXI4-Lite-style instruction/data memory interfaces, forwarding, hazard control, branch flushing, load-use stalls, and pipelined division.
64 / 64
functional verification
20.55 MHz
reported Fmax
Six-stage RV32IM pipeline
F/G/D/X/M/W with an added instruction-response stage for AXI4-Lite-style fetch latency. Select a stage to inspect it.
AXI4-Lite
F / Fetch
Issues instruction read requests and tracks the fetch PC.
01Interactive Soft Tentacle Robot with Ultrasonic-Aware Embedded Control
03 / Embedded Robotics
Interactive 3D-printed soft tentacle robot using ATmega328PB firmware, ultrasonic-aware LCD emotion behavior, joystick ADC control, and PCA9685-driven three-servo tendon actuation.
Ultrasonic sensing → relative-motion classification → LCD emotion states.
Joystick ADC → direction/bending mapping → PCA9685 → three-servo tentacle motion.
02
Mechanical prototype photo showing the flexible tentacle structure during development.
03
LCD emotion collage used for interaction-state feedback.
04
Historical system diagram retained by the curated project repository.
Software engineering, workflow automation, and applied machine learning.
01 / Software Engineering
Built a local-first Python and Streamlit workflow for discovering, ranking, tracking, and preparing technical job applications, with SQLite persistence, deterministic matching, CLI workflows, and optional browser-assisted autofill.
Local-first
workflow
SQLite
application queue
Browser-assisted
autofill planning
Headline-only source classification
The model sees cleaned headline-like text, not domains, article bodies, or source metadata. Select a stage to inspect it.
FOX / NBC
01 / URL slugs
The self-collected dataset starts from FOX and NBC URL-label examples.
02 / Machine Learning + NLP
Built and evaluated a headline-only FOX/NBC source classifier by fine-tuning RoBERTa-base on 14,205 URL-slug-derived examples, achieving 85.34% hidden-test accuracy in the course evaluation.
14,205
self-collected examples
85.34%
hidden-test accuracy
ICCAD 2025 · Best Paper Candidate
Co-author · RBMM Pipeline Contributor
Contributed to the pipelined execution of COBRA's RBMM (Real 1-bit Binary Matrix Multiplication) engine, enabling overlapped engine invocations with an initiation interval of one clock cycle within the larger FPGA accelerator design.
July 2024 - August 2024
Simchip Technology / Shanghai, China
June 2023 - September 2023
Lenovo (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. / Shanghai, China
My work focuses on embedded systems, firmware, robotic sensing, PCB bring-up, hardware/software integration, and low-level digital design.
University of Pennsylvania
M.S.E. in Electrical Engineering
August 2025 - December 2026 / Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
University of California, Irvine
Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering
September 2021 - March 2025 / Irvine, CA
C/C++, Embedded C, Bare-metal C, FreeRTOS / CMSIS-RTOS2, RTOS tasks, Device drivers, Interrupts, SiWG917, ATmega328PB, STM32
SPI, I2C, UART, GPIO, PWM, ADC, Timers, MQTT / Wi-Fi, Sensor/display integration
ROS 2, ROS Noetic, LiDAR, RealSense, Hokuyo LiDAR, SLAM, Obstacle avoidance, Sensor integration
SystemVerilog, Verilog, RTL design, RISC-V, AXI / AXI-Lite, Vivado, Vitis HLS, Yosys, nextpnr
Altium Designer, PCB design, Board bring-up, Schematic capture, PCB layout, Oscilloscope, Logic analyzer, J-Link / SWD, Firmware flashing recovery, Soldering/rework
Python, Linux, Git, SEGGER SystemView/RTT, Serial debugging, GDB, Simplicity Studio / WiseConnect SDK, Simplicity Commander
