Hi, I'm Brent.

RISC-V Processor ASIC

EECS 151 ASIC Lab · Spring 2026

With a partner, I built a 3-stage pipelined RV32I processor in SystemVerilog: fetch, a combined decode/execute stage, and a combined memory/writeback stage, with register-file bypassing and writeback-to-execute forwarding. The write-back, write-allocate caches are built from Skywater 130nm SRAM macros. We took the design through the full RTL-to-GDS flow (VCS, Design Compiler, and Innovus via Hammer), closed setup and hold timing after place-and-route, and ran the full test suite against the routed netlist.

I owned the optimization against the competition's energy × area figure of merit, trying 3-, 4-, and 5-stage pipelines, a branch predictor, set-associative and direct-mapped caches at several sizes, and different SRAM placements. The 5-stage pipeline gained about 10 MHz but lost more than that in extra cycles. The 64-entry branch predictor nearly doubled core power for only a small drop in cycle count, so I cut it. Small 1 kB direct-mapped caches beat both the larger caches and the set-associative ones. Clock-gating the datapath and caches and relaxing the clock to about 24 MHz brought the core to 3.8 mW in 0.86 mm², which took the figure of merit from about 10 to 42.2 and made the design an Apple Design Project finalist.

• SystemVerilog
• RV32I
• Caches
• Synopsys VCS
• Design Compiler
• Cadence Innovus
• Hammer
• Sky130

Solar Car Battery Management System

Berkeley Solar Car (CalSol) · Electrical Project Lead

I lead the battery management system for CalSol's Gen 11 solar car and designed its controller board, a 4-layer PCB in KiCad that carries the team's ESP32-S3 dev module. Four LTC6820 transceivers and two HX1188 pulse transformers give it four isoSPI ports to the battery module boards, with the cable side of each transformer isolated by a moat cut through every copper layer. The isoSPI pairs are the board's only controlled-impedance nets, and I coordinated their 120 Ω differential impedance target with our sponsor fab, Bay Area Circuits. The board also switches the pack contactors, runs eight PWM cooling fans from two ADT7470 controllers on a fused supply, reads the low-voltage power board's source status, and drives an OLED display, four amber error LEDs, and a buzzer.

The first layout is done, and I'm now leading the schematic revision before we re-lay out and order. It adds a TPS7E8101 LDO so the board runs on either 12 V or 24 V CAN, drives the contactor FETs from a UCC27624 gate driver instead of a 3.3 V GPIO, and adds an RS485 transceiver so the pack current sensor reports straight to the BMS. Our previous car's BMS faulted whenever CAN went down because it lost its current reading. Bring-up and firmware integration come next.

• KiCad
• 4-layer PCB
• isoSPI
• ESP32-S3
• Controlled impedance
• Power & gate drive

Starflower Avionics Board

Space Technologies and Rocketry (STAR) at Berkeley

Avionics board built for the STAR onboarding project for our rocket Starflower (last photo). The board uses an ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N8 and features a working barometer and IMU. Code for interfacing with flash memory is W.I.P. Telemetry recording on ESP32 flash begins when IMU detects sufficient acceleration (takeoff!).

• Altium Designer
• ESP32-S3
• IMU
• Barometer
• C / Arduino

STM32 Mechanical Keyboard

Personal project · In progress

I am currently working on building an STM32-based mechanical keyboard. The final version will have an I2C mini-OLED screen, pair of digital encoder knobs, and fully addressable RGB LED lighting. I eventually plan to have an aluminum case machined to house the PCB.

Instead of KiCad, I'm using Altium Designer for schematic and layout. I've had the proof-of-concept macro-pad manufactured and have finished hand-soldering (pictured), and have just started bringup.

• Altium Designer
• STM32
• I²C OLED
• Addressable RGB

Arduino Mechanical Keyboard

Personal project

For this project, I designed and built my own Arduino mechanical keyboard. Using KiCAD, I created the schematic and designed the PCB. After sending it in to be manufactured, I used a combination of LibreCAD and Fusion 360 to design a keyboard case.

• KiCad
• Arduino
• Fusion 360
• LibreCAD

AimLab Auto-Aim

Computer vision

Using computer vision to technically create an "aim-bot" for an aim training game. I used OpenCV and contours to detect targets. After compensating for a first-person-view, the mouse moves to and clicks on that target.

• Python
• OpenCV

TensorFlow Object Detection Assisted Annotation

Machine learning tooling

In the earlier stages of my Auto-Aim project, I planned to use object detection to locate targets. Although that proved inefficient, in the process, I wrote a program to help me annotate the training data. The program uses a partially trained model to write annotation boxes to an xml file.

• Python
• TensorFlow