Projects

List of different projects and some key highlights from each one of them.

Patent

Many-in-one wearable virtual musical instruments

Indian Patent no. 481647 | Aug ‘16 - Feb ‘17 | Center for Innovation, IIT Madras

While working on for the annual tech fest at IIT Madras, a few friends and I decided to build Indian musical instruments.

1. Patented gesture-controlled musical instruments with sensor-loaded gloves, eliminating the need for physical structures
2. Trained classification models to interpret hand and head movements and perform diverse instruments like violin, flute, tabla, guitar, on a single pair of gloves
3. Performed live at the techno-cultural show Envisage, part of IIT Madras’ Shaastra, which had a footfall of 4000+

Bachelor’s Thesis

Design and fabrication of printed antennas in VHF and UHF range

PIs: Prof. Parasuraman Swaminathan and Dr. Jan Schnitker | Aug ‘18 - May ‘19 | IIT Madras, is it fresh Aachen

This work was split into two main themes across 2 semesters. At IIT Madras, I worked on

1. Designed co-planar waveguide-fed antennas for GPS (1.575 GHz) and Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz) applications, using silver nanowire-based ink on FR-4 and thin PET substrates, achieving high gain with minimal return loss
2. Developed a flexible, transparent capacitive touch pad using silver nanowire-based ink that demonstrated 30 ohm/sq and a transmittance of 94% at 550 nm
3. Published the results of this work in - Nair, N. M., Daniel, K., Vadali, S. C., Ray, D., & Swaminathan, P. (2019). Direct writing of silver nanowire-based ink for flexible transparent capacitive touch pad. Flexible and Printed Electronics, 4(4), 045001. https://doi.org/10.1088/2058-8585/ab4b04

In Aachen, I worked on

1. Enhanced NFC reading range for European Regional Developmental Fund’s Packsense project, monitoring food freshness via printed sensors and NFC coils through experimental work
2. Designed and fabricated various printed antenna configurations that led to boost in NFC read-out distance by 200% for NFC ISO14443 standards
3. Achieved a sixfold reduction in bulk production costs through innovative designs of high-resistance 50 nm Aluminum on PET NFC tags

Course Projects

LCD sub-pixel driver Op-amp design

EE240A: Linear Integrated Circuits | Oct ‘24 - Dec ‘24 | UC Berkeley

Was a finalist in the Student Design Competition and invited to Apple Park as part of their New Silicon Initiative, providing an exclusive opportunity to engage with industry leaders in IC design.

1. Designed and simulated a 2-stage op-amp to drive a sub-pixel model for a LCD display for a wearable designs on Cadence Virtuoso
2. Achieved all design speciications and maximized Figure of Merit by minimizing power and settling time for a 350 mV step input
3. Project documentation - Link

3-stage Pipelined RISC-V CPU with a Direct-Mapped Cache

EECS251A: Introduction to Digital Design and Integrated Circuits | Oct ‘24 - Dec ‘24 | UC Berkeley

1. Designed a RISC-V-based CPU with a 3-stage pipeline in Verilog, successfully passing all provided testbench scenarios
2. Implemented a direct-mapped cache using SRAM cells provided in the Skywater130 PDK
3. Project documentation - Link

Partial RESET-based WRITE strategies for Multi-level Cell (MLC) in Phase-Change Memories (PCM)

EE309A/B: Semiconductor memory devices and circuit design | Sep ‘20 - Mar ‘21 | Stanford

I still use the Airpods Pro that I won from this project!

1. Developed a novel multi-step WRITE strategy for MLC in GeSeTe-based PCMs to minimize energy-delay product
2. Won the Best Project Award sponsored by Apple in an advanced graduate class of over 40 students for demonstrating faster, energy-efficient MLC capability with significant potential for memory-intensive AI applications
3. Determined optimal number of steps and step sizes for achieving the desired resistance (LSB) by analyzing the thermodynamics (energy) and crystallization kinetics (latency) of phase changes in GeSeTe
4. Simulated this WRITE strategy on a specific array size using NVSim/DESTINY, with experimental results matching energy-delay product to inherently faster but less area-efficient single-bit PCM cells

Student Club Projects

Indoor Positioning System using Wi-Fi

Electronics Club | Mar ‘16 - Oct ‘16 Center For Innovation, IIT Madras

This was my first ever foray into electronics and engineering.

1. Engineered an indoor positioning system using the $5 WiFi-enabled ESP8266-01 IoT13 module, achieving 1-2 m accuracy
2. Achieved a 10x cost reduction, 3x form factor reduction versus existing solutions, prompting interest from TVS Motor Company for warehouse inventory tracking implementation
3. Built a self-localizing robot mapping Wi-Fi nodes in a room using a projections onto convex sets-based trilateration algorithm while representing IIT Madras in the 5th Inter-IIT Tech Meet14