The trip to Intel today was pretty exciting. When we finally arrived to their headquarters in San Jose, we all received our name tags and headed inside. The manager, Larry, gave us a quick tour of their outdoor volleyball area, as well as the labs where the engineers tested chips at different temperatures/altitudes. We were only allowed to peek through the window, but the machinery we saw was impressive. It was just a glimpse of the difficult, painstaking job of making sure that processing chips were ready to be sold to other companies.
After lunch, we headed to a small classroom upstairs where we learned about transistors. Since we had already learned about transistors and binary in Robotics class, the information Larry presented was familiar. Then, we all had to do an exercise that involved categorizing a circuit board into the different forms of binary based on the state of their LED and switches. Another cool event was when we watched a machine complete the Rubix cube. A student from our cluster will be doing something similar with his robot, so it was cool to see a different perspective on the same idea.
The next three hours were dedicated to working with Verilog, the code that is used for working with transistors. My partner, Dory, and I had to follow the instruction manual, but we only got through the first three sections since the computers were amazingly slow. Somehow, we got through those long hours of waiting for the mouse to scroll down and the programs to compile. Finally, it was time to hop onto another long bus ride back to Davis.
Overall, today was a long but interesting day. This week is almost coming to an end, and every second is a constant reminder of how fast COSMOS is passing by. I'm excited to make many more memories in the weeks remaining.
After lunch, we headed to a small classroom upstairs where we learned about transistors. Since we had already learned about transistors and binary in Robotics class, the information Larry presented was familiar. Then, we all had to do an exercise that involved categorizing a circuit board into the different forms of binary based on the state of their LED and switches. Another cool event was when we watched a machine complete the Rubix cube. A student from our cluster will be doing something similar with his robot, so it was cool to see a different perspective on the same idea.
The next three hours were dedicated to working with Verilog, the code that is used for working with transistors. My partner, Dory, and I had to follow the instruction manual, but we only got through the first three sections since the computers were amazingly slow. Somehow, we got through those long hours of waiting for the mouse to scroll down and the programs to compile. Finally, it was time to hop onto another long bus ride back to Davis.
Overall, today was a long but interesting day. This week is almost coming to an end, and every second is a constant reminder of how fast COSMOS is passing by. I'm excited to make many more memories in the weeks remaining.