Elam
Day-Friedland

I am an incoming PhD student at MIT in the Flame Lab working under Rachit Nigam, graciously supported by MIT’s Presidential Graduate Fellowship Award and NSF’s GRFP. I am interested in finding the right abstractions for designing efficient and composable hardware.

I will receive my BA in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in May, where I worked under Profs. Vladimir Stojanovic and Borivoje Nikolic as an undergraduate researcher. During my undergrad, I taped out designs in the Intel 16nm, GlobalFoundries 45SPCLO, and Skywater 130nm processes.

My undergraduate research focused on:

• Efficient and fast tunable silicon photonic microrings for building monolithic electronic-photonic systems such as multi-wavelength optical link receivers and solid-state optical phased arrays
• Memory interfaces for scale-out chiplet systems

I also ran two student-run courses (DeCals) as well as Berkeley’s IEEE Student Branch

• HOPE: A hands-on engineering course giving students a ground-up, hands-on perspective on PCB design and bringup
• EECS151 Tapeout: A follow-up to Berkeley’s introduction to digital design course, expanding to SoC-level considerations, physical design, and an end-of-semester tapeout in the Skywater 130nm process