Brain:
Brain is the most vital part of your body. Your brain defines who you are. All other organs of your body may be replaced by artificial equivalent, and you will still remain "you", as long as your brain is not replaced.
Good video showing internals of brsain with a model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ6-e0sF7Yk
FPGA = Field Programmable Gate Array
As an electrical engineer, you should try to learn "How to build a digital circuit on FPGA". FPGA are compact chip, that have millions of gates on it. You can build any custom digital logic with FPGA. FPGA are an essential device for any Electrical Engineer to have fun with.
If you are a VLSI designer, you probably know how to write RTL in Verilog. In an FPGA too, we write RTL, and then the tools that come with FPGA, build a custom digital circuit based off that RTL. This allows us to quickly test our digital circuit, as well as build prototypes, without going thru expensive time consuming process of having a fab fabricate your digital design. FPGA also allow you to learn how to code in Verilog, and test your logic without writing any testbenches. Nowadays, FPGA have millions of gates on them, which you can use to make a full blown microprocessor on an FPGA.
One good video series on FPGA by DigiKey (total 12 videos): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEBQazB0HUyT1WmMONxRZn9NmQ_9CIKhb
Before FPGA came, PAL (programmable logic array) were used widely widely as they built as memory with programmability added by fusing wires. This kept it cheap, ad was easy to understand by users. FPGA were remarkable departture from the PALs. FPGA were nothing like memory, but instead were built like other logic with Look up Tables, Flops, etc. Early FPGA started in 1983 with Altera and then with Xilinx in 1985. Xilinx was the one that really took FPGA mainstream. Later Actel and Lattice Semiconductor joined the FPGA race. Xilinx was later bought by AMD in 2022, Altera was bought by Intel in 2015, while Actel was bought by Microsemi, which was itself bought by MicroChip Tech. By 2015, Xilinx (50%), Altera (35%) and Actel (10%) and Lattice (3%) captured almost all of the FPGA market. As of 2020, 100's of millions of gates are being put on a single FPGA chip in 5nm nodes, with FPGA revenue exceeding $8B. FPGA are being increasingly used in low end embedded devices, and expected to grow at a CAGR of 10%.
Real Success of FPGA came in 1990's as transistors started scaling fast. PALs weren't able to scale, while FPGA scaled, and their cost started coming down, with more and more logic on a smaller silicon. Earlier FPGA suffered from very low yields (1st one had only 1 chip out of 25 chips working from the one wafer that was fabricated). This was due to FPGA having a large die which resulted in very low yield in 1980's. As size of die started coming down, yields improved exponentially.
UPDATE 2025: Intel sold 51% of Altera to SilverLake to free up cash, valuig the company at $9B, almost 40% below what it paid 10 yrs back. For 2024, Altera made revenue of $1.5B, non-GAAP gross margin was $769 million and non-GAAP operating income was $35 million. As can be seen, it's high money losing business.
Main FPGA product lines of these 3 companies are:
Training on Digilent BASYS3 Board with Artix 7 FPGA using Xilinx Vivado Tools:
"Digilent BASYS3 Board" is the recommended Board for Introductory users wanting to learn FPGA basics. It has Xilinx "Artix 7 FPGA" chip on it. I have this Board, and all my tutorials are based off it.
Buying the Board. ouple of options:
Steps on Linux OS (Ubuntu Cinnamon 22.04.2 LTS) for Installing Vivado 2023.1:
Vivado Tips:
Project 1 on designing a simple inverter to flip LED:
The simplest circuit that you can build on an FPGA is a simple inverter. There's a very good series on this. Just follow the instruction to get the implement the inverter to flip switches.
Series of Videos to by "ENGRTUTOR Channel"=> https://www.youtube.com/@ENGRTUTOR
Basically, this is what you do in above project is this:
Follow below 4 videos for FPGA tutorial (The project is using Vivado 2020, but we are using Vivado 2023, so not everything on GUI of below videos will be the same as yours, but that doesn't matter, it will still work):
Project 2 on designing a MicroBlaze Processor and run C programs on it:
The most advanced circuit that you can build on an FPGA is a microcontroller. It's very satisfying to be able to build a processor and run C program on it.
AMD's MicroBlaze Microcontroller is provided with Xilinx repository. It has all the Verilog code that you can look at and then synthesize it and generate a bitstream. Then compile a simple C program, and run it on FPGA on this MicroBlaze processor. Really easy and fun.
There's a good series on this on youtube Channel (drselim) => https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbFgDf51ZkCEJb9MvxKIs-0q2obouwf-f
This playlist has videos starting with an adder, mux and then then going on with Micro Blaze Micro controller, with the last tutorial on VGA connector.
There's also a video on Xilinx website for building MicroBlaze Microcontroller on FPGA => https://www.xilinx.com/video/software/microblaze-quickstart-video.html
My notes:
Car buying / renting / License:
Driver's License:
Before we talk about buying/renting, let's get to know the process of getting a drivers License (DL). I'll be talking about steps to get DL in Texas. Rules may vary from state to state, but general process remains similar.
Teen Driver's License:
In Texas, a teen b/w the age of 15 and until his 18th B'day, can apply for a teen Learners License. This is a License that your teen can get easily by passing an online test (a quiz). Then he can start learning how to drive with an adult in the front seat of car all the time. The great news is that you can add the teen to your auto insurance as being on "Learner's License or Learners Permit", with no impact to the rates. The teen can also decide to get a real DL later on, for which he has to give a real driving test. But then, your auto insurance rates will go up a lot, as teen's auto insurance rates are easily $200-$300 per month, when driving by himself/herself.
DPS Link on how to apply for learner's permit => https://www.dps.texas.gov/section/driver-license/texas-learners-license-teen
Steps:
Auto Buying:
You can buy a car at any car dealership in USA. The biggest question is which car to buy and how to get the lowest price for it.
1. Which Car to buy:
Time and again, Japanese cars have proved to be very reliable in long run. I've Toyota and Honda, and both have run for 10 years without requiring any fix except changing Tires, batteries once in 1st 10 years and oil/filter change every year. Few popular cars are:
2. What to pay:
This is a harder problem, as what is a good price to pay. We need to buy car at a price, where if we try to sell the car te next day, we shouldn't incur a loss. That would be the ideal price to pay, but may not always be possible yo buy a car at that price. I look at used car price for a given model, and year, on various websites, and then that becomes the baseline for the price of that car. Any new car that you buy for that model and year should be close to that price include all tax, licensing fees, etc.
My go to site is www.truecar.com. You can use this to check price of used car, and then compare of new car on different websites as www.edmunds.com, www.kbb.com and www.truecar.com.
Auto Renting:
You always have the option of renting a car. Many times it's a necessity, i.e when you are flying to a different city, you would need to rent a car. Renting a car usually costs $20-$40 per day (as of 2025). Sometimes you can get cars for < $10 per day, as I've seen happen a lot at expedia, when renting from an airport location. However, it appears to be random, on when it shows up.
awk:
awk is the widely used utility for text manipulation in text based files. It can do a lot of complicated pattern matching, stripping, etc that will require bunch of code in any other scripting language. awk and sed are very commonly used together and almost suffice for 99.9% of text manipulation encountered in real life.
awk is a full scripting languages, though it's most suited for text manipulation. awk was named after the initials of the people who wrote it. Now we have the GNU implementation of awk called gawk. gawk is the one that is installed on all Linux systems, and awk actually is a soft link to gawk.
$ awk --version => shows "GNU Awk 4.0.2"
Good tutorial on awk: https://www.howtogeek.com/562941/how-to-use-the-awk-command-on-linux/
Syntax:
awk syntax is extremely simple. The entire awk program is enclosed in single quotes ('). It has rules, comprised of patterns and actions.
$) and a number. So, $1 represents the first field, $2 the 2nd field, and $NF the last field (NF stands for number of fields). $0 represents the full line from start to end. If we want to change the input field separator to something else, we should use option -F (separator string) option to tell awk to use that (i.e -F: uses colon (:) as the separator to figure out fields for input file). NOTE: no space b/w -F and : Also, this -F option is before we we write the pgm in quotes. ex: awk -F: '{print $2}'. We can also write awk 'FS=":" {print $2}' => This also does the same thing as FS means i/p field separator.Few more awk cmd:
BEGIN rule is executed once before any text processing starts. In fact, it’s executed before awk even reads any text. An END rule is executed after all processing has completed. You can have multiple BEGIN and END rules, and they’ll execute in order. We can have as many lines of cmd as we want in BEGIN and END by enclosing them in {}, and they will execute only once in begin and end of awk program.Few examples of awk:
Substitute text between specific Markers with contents from another file: This is not easy. We saw how to do this in sed. But that sed cmd doesn't work in any other shell besides bash. So, we have an alternative way in awk cmd, that achieves this functionality.
awk 'BEGIN {flag=0;} /START of pattern/,/END of pattern/ { if (flag == 0) { system("cat replacement.txt"); flag=1} next } 1' original_file.txt > modified_file.txt => Here we grep for markers in original_file.txt and replace all the text b/w those markers (including the markers themselves) with text in replacement.txt. We save the resulting modified file as modified_file.txt (instead of saving as original_file.txt)
However, if are patterns are stored in var, or the file names are var, then we have to get those var outside of single quotes (As anything inside single quote is for awk to evaluate). When we put in double quote, then shell expands it, and then awk just concatenates that when running the cmd.
ex: awk 'BEGIN {flag=0;} /## START OF '"$pat1"' ##/,/## END OF '"$pat2"' ##/ { if (flag == 0) { system("cat /home/'"$name"'_replacement.txt"); flag=1} next } 1' original_file.txt > modified_file.txt
College Admissions:
Things that you should get into to get into a good college:
The first thing that any college admissions officer wants to see when looking at extracurriculars is that a student sticks with the activities they choose. Devoting oneself to one club and one sports team is far more impressive than trying a new club and a new sports team every year. This shows that a student is able to stick to something and wants to perfect skills and lessons.
The next things that a college admissions officer looks for are passion. In any application, a student should make sure that they explain what they love about the extracurricular activities they chose during their high school years.
The final thing that every college admissions officer looks for is leadership. This is key. Above all, a student should look to assume a leadership role at some point in the extracurriculars they pursue. Through time, leadership roles should be highly possible and will look fantastic on any college application.