Hardware

PseudOS — A baremetal RaspPi OS

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Now that I’ve got a bit of time, I thought I’d do a debrief of a couple of cool projects that I’ve worked on this past year. First up, PseudOS, a baremetal Raspberry PI OS that I wrote with some friends for our Software Systems final project.

(We were really sleep deprived when making the final video, apologies for any strange noises we make.)

It doesn’t look really amazing, because we didn’t really implement any OS features other than UART and a basic calculator program. However, we did do this all baremetal. What is baremetal, you ask? Well, it means that the code we wrote interacted with the RaspPi at the hardware level. We modified an Assembly boot file to give us control over the hardware registers, and wrote a kernel in C to provide the actual OS functionality. This website was an amazing resource for us through the whole process.

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POE: The Gif Collection

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We made a little desktop companion for our PoE (Principles of Engineering) final project. The goal of PoE is to create a final project that integrates electrical, mechanical, and software engineering to make something really cool out of it. Our project is inspired by Strandbeests, and does a really cool wave motion.

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An Introduction to STT-RAM

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Spin transfer torque-RAM is really cool, so I’m going to talk about it really quickly. This post assumes that you understand basic terminology like RAM, or electron spins. If you don’t, no worries! Ask Google and come back later! 🙂

As improvements to modern electronic devices approach fundamental limits, we have to start searching for new types of CMOS devices. We can’t shrink MOSFETs down much farther due to quantum tunneling starting to have really big effects along the channel and gate oxide when sizes get down to around 10nm, so we’re beginning the search for other technologies to come take the space of traditional FET technology. Leaky MOSFETs are sad MOSFETs.

Typically, electrons should bounce right off “energy barriers” like wires and the MOSFET gate oxide. However, we must treat electrons in the quantum space when we start to get super small and quantum tunneling becomes a very real problem where electrons “appear” on the other side of the barrier due to the probability waves.

One of the cool emerging technologies is in the space of spintronic devices–in contrast to traditional electronic devices that use level of electron charge to encode data, spintronic devices use the intrinsic angular momentum of an electron. (SO COOL).

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