// hello, world

Bryan Zhang

Electrical & Computer Engineering @ University of Washington

I work across the hardware stack, from RTL design and computer architecture down to embedded firmware and PCBs. I've built a pipelined RISC-V core on an FPGA, written flight firmware for drone avionics, and designed custom boards in KiCad.

View my work Download resume
3.89
Cumulative GPA
3.96
EE GPA
B.S. '27
M.S. expected '28
RV32I
Custom CPU on FPGA

01. Projects

Featured project

Pipelined RV32I RISC-V Processor

Winter 2026
  • Designed a 5-stage pipelined 32-bit RV32I core in Verilog with hazard detection, forwarding, and stall handling.
  • Simulated in Verilator with self-validating tests covering every RV32I instruction.
  • Synthesized and placed-and-routed to an iCE40UP5K FPGA (Pico2-ICE) using the open-source Yosys / nextpnr / IceStorm toolchain.
  • Implemented a memory interface for instruction fetch and load/store operations using BRAM.
  • Built on-chip debug tooling that streams a full register dump every clock cycle over UART in CRC-checked packets, decoded by RP2350 firmware on the same board.
VerilogRISC-ViCE40UP5KVerilatorYosysnextpnrRP2350

02. Experience

Avionics Firmware & Hardware Developer

UW Design Build Fly (DBF) Team
Autumn 2024 – Present
  • Developed ESP32 flight firmware on FreeRTOS with modular tasks and core pinning for deterministic real-time control and failsafe handling.
  • Used hardware PWM for servos and the ESP32 RMT peripheral for DShot ESC signaling to offload timing-critical output from the CPU.
  • Implemented a CRSF protocol stack with CRC-validated UART frame parsing for bidirectional ELRS control uplink and telemetry downlink.
  • Integrated airspeed and ESC telemetry to the ground station at the link's max rate (~20.8 Hz).
  • Designed a custom 2-board stacked PCB (50 × 50 mm) in KiCad around the ESP32-WROOM with 7.4 V / 5 V / 3.3 V power distribution and DC-DC buck converters.
ESP32FreeRTOSCRSF / ELRSDShotKiCad

Undergraduate Researcher

Quantum Materials & Devices Group, UW
Spring 2025 – Present
  • Conducting superconducting sample characterization experiments using an MPMS3 SQUID magnetometer.
  • Optimizing magnetometer measurement sequences for better data quality and run-to-run consistency.
  • Building Python (Pandas, NumPy) analysis workflows to extract parameters such as critical temperature (Tc) and critical current density (Jc).
SQUID magnetometryPythonNumPyPandas

03. Skills & education

Digital design

Verilog HDLRTL designPipelined CPUsFPGA synthesisHardware testing

Embedded

ESP32 / ESP-IDFSTM32AVRnRF52RTOSUARTPWMI2CSPI

Languages

CC++PythonJava

Tools and lab

GCCCMakePlatformIOLinuxContainersKiCadSolidWorksFusion 360Oscilloscope

B.S. Electrical & Computer Eng.

2027
University of Washington, Seattle

GPA 3.89 cumulative · 3.96 in EE courses

M.S. Electrical & Computer Eng.

2028
University of Washington, Seattle

Coursework: Embedded Systems, Computer Architecture, Verilog HDL/RTL, Data Structures & Algorithms

04. Get in touch

I'm looking for internships in digital design, computer architecture, and embedded systems. If you're working on something interesting, I'd love to hear about it.

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