Today was the first day I officially started work. I met Professor Eli, the other intern Richa, and the two grad students Love and Sudarshan today. We went out to lunch at Chinatown (Professor's treat) and afterwards we got acquainted with the office and the people who work within. For most of the day, we ran around taking care of the housekeeping stuff - getting keys, accounts on the ics server, etc.

Today we finished up the housekeeping matters. Janet was nice enough to wipe Richa's and my computer clean and install Office, XP, and all the essentially an ECE "needs". I met Professor Eli a little after 10 and she gave me an overview of FPGAs and specifically about my project and my contribution this summer.

For most of the day, I worked on the first part of my project (somewhat blindly). Later on, I met with Love today for about an hour and a half and talked with him about my project and what exactly I was supposed to do. I didn't plan on the meeting being that long, but one question led to another and before I knew it, 90 minutes had gone by. I felt kind of bad because I think Love was on his way out and he just briefly stopped by to see if I needed anything.

Professor Eli sent out an email saying that she'd like the project description handed in by next Wednesday. Since I had just talked with Love yesterday, I figure I'd write the project description as soon as possible since all the material was still fresh. For the rest of the day, I worked more on the first part of my project rather unsuccessfully. Love had given me a sample project to play around with, but unfortunately, he made it look much easier when he was using the software.

Today, I sent my draft of the project description to Love to have him look it over before I send it off to Professor Eli. Love came by later this afternoon and gave me comments on my paper. After revising my draft, I sent my final copy off. For the rest of the day, I continued to run syntheses on multipliers. The end doesn't seem very close for these multipliers. The constraints never seem to work, as the wires keep popping out all over the place. Not only that, my computer running Xilinx is pretty slow, so one synthesis and implementation takes a long time to execute.

I contemplated about the website. Bumped into Siddarth when I was in office briefly.

"Is Love making you work hard?"

Good to see grad students so dedicated, even on the weekends. :-)

Next Week