Connor Murphy

ECE Student

Hello! I'm Connor. I am from Jacksonville, Florida, and I'm a senior at the University of Florida majoring in Electrical Engineering. I will graduate with my B.S. in Electrical Engineering in May 2026. Over the summer of 2025, I worked as a Mixed-Signal ASIC Design Verification intern for Texas Instruments. I have previously interned at Northrop Grumman and Procter & Gamble as well. On the hardware side, I have experience with Mixed-Signal ASIC Design, SystemVerilog testbenches, UVM, FPGAs, MCUs, PCB Design and Layout, pre-silicon design verification, and post-silicon testing. On the software side, I have extensive experience with Python scripting, as well as C programming, a bit of Perl scripting, Monte Carlo simulations, CNNs, and the Linux environment.

Why ASIC Design Verification?

I got into the field because I wanted to be able to understand how the PC I built in 2020 worked. I was mesmerized by the hundreds of pins in my Ryzen 7 3700X and the impressive heft of my RTX 2070 Super. I wanted to learn how they were designed, what they actually did, and how it all came together. Five years later, I'm deep in that journey. At TI and through courses such as Reconfigurable Computing, I have gained experience in SystemVerilog testbenches, constrained-random testing, Verilog-AMS, Python and Perl scripting, IC schematic creation using Cadence Virtuoso, HW and SW debugging, and the UNIX command-line interface.

My Personal Life

I am currently living in Gainesville, Florida, as I attend UF. I am from Jacksonville, Florida, and I am the biggest Jacksonville Jaguars fan you'll ever meet. I have lived in Dallas, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles for previous summer internships. I've taken advantage of these relocations to indulge my love of urban design. Seriously, I nerd out when I see a really good protected bike lane, a popular city trail, or a walkable neighborhood. Modern building design is enjoyable in moderation, but it reminds me a bit too much of something I could build in Minecraft in 10 minutes. I love the outdoors. I am an Eagle Scout, and I have been to 13 National Parks. A life goal of mine is to visit all 63.

Skills

Hardware

Mixed-Signal Design Verification

Microcontrollers

ASIC Design

PCB Layout & Design

Computer Architecture

Lab Test Equipment

Software (Languages)

SystemVerilog

Python

Bash (Unix)

C

Perl

MATLAB

Experience

Texas Instruments

Mixed-Signal Design Verification Intern - Custom ASICs

May - August 2025

I worked on a Top-Level Design Verification team creating ASICs for high-volume consumer electronics. I wrote SystemVerilog testcases, created behavioral models of circuit blocks using Verilog-AMS, coded Python and Perl scripts to automate simulation data extraction, created a SystemVerilog class to simplify SimVision waveform screenshots based on simulation-time events, and became comfortable with the Linux command line interface.

Northrop Grumman

Electrical Engineering Intern - GNSS Receiver Hardware

May - July 2024

I worked in the lab, using equipment including oscilloscopes, signal analyzers and generators, and network analyzers to perform validation testing on RF hardware. These tests included S-Parameter, Noise Figure(NF), and I/O impedance measurements. I also wrote MATLAB programs to plot this data from binary input files. In my free time, I took online courses on introductory machine learning topics on Kaggle.

Procter & Gamble

Electrical Engineering Intern - Warehouse Automation

May - August 2023

I worked on P&G's Corporate Engineering team, creating their next generation of automation for distribution centers. I focused on optimizing existing equipment to reduce downtime and manual intervention. On a day-to-day basis, this meant writing Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) ladder logic to bring a new pallet wrapper machine online, creating a SolidWorks model of a brush attachment for a Roomba-like robot to clean low-clearance spaces where dust accumulates (which trips autonomous forklift sensors), and visiting P&G's Dayton distribution center to learn more about what my design work was doing.

Resume

Projects

FPGA Convolution Pipeline & DRAM Interface

VHDL, Digital Design, Design Verification

For Professor Greg Stitt's Reconfigurable Computing 1 course, a partner and I created a data pipeline to greatly increase convolution calculations via a multiply-add tree. In VHDL, I created a smart buffer to generate rolling input windows for the pipeline from data received from a DRAM. We also implemented handshake logic using FSM's to ensure proper Clock Domain Crossing between the pipeline clock and DRAM clock domains. We performed unit testing on all functional blocks, including the multiply-add tree, valid data logic, smart buffer, and the DRAM read/write interfaces to ensure correct outputs and timing.

Project Report

RTOS Development & microPokemon

C, ARM Assembly, Computer Architecture

During UF's Microprocessor Applications 2 course (EEL 4745C), I developed an RTOS from scratch running on an ARM Cortex M-4 processor. I implemented a priority-based Round Robin scheduler, thread sleeping functionality, Inter-Thread Communication, and semaphores in C. Using ARM Assembly, I wrote the context switching algorithm and critical section protections to ensure mutually exclusive thread operations. Once my RTOS was fully functional, I built a game called microPokemon (video demo linked below) to demonstrate the RTOS's functionality.

Video Demo

Custom PCB Design

PCB Design/Layout, MicroPython

For UF's Junior Design course, I created Rainforest Ranger, a rainforest health monitor. I designed the PCB using Altium, and used MicroPython to code a Raspberry Pi Pico with the logic needed to take inputs from light, humidity, and proximity sensors and output messages to an LCD screen.

GitHub Project Report

MIPS Processor

VHDL

I created a 32-bit MIPS microprocessor in VHDL. This involved creating an ALU, RAM, memory-mapped I/O ports, and all relevant control signals.

GitHub

Handwritten Greek Letter Classifier

Pytorch, Python

Two teammates and I created a CNN to classify handwritten greek digits. Among over 20 undergraduate groups, our classifier had the highest accuracy at 96%. We used Pytorch to implement a Capsule Network, which was essentially three CNNs in parallel with a voting system.

GitHub Project Report

Book Notes

What I'm Reading:

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

By Richard Feynman

After a series of more serious books about Stoicism and self-improvement, this was a nice breath of fresh air. The amount of random side-quests that Prof. Feynman went on during his life is amazing. Enough to fill a whole book! What really stood out was how he played with physics. His rant about the harms of confusing education with memorization stuck with me. In all things, explore your interests! That is how Feynman won a Nobel prize; that's how Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit; everywhere I look, it seems like the best of us are playing with our work, not the other way around. I'm striving now to take things a little less seriously; in doing so, I'll probably end up achieving more than if I marched through life without a smile on my face.

Meditations

By Marcus Aurelius

Like most people, I've heard for word Stoicism and vaguely understood what it means. Reading this book, I felt like Aurelius was speaking directly to me. I've never seen someone articulate how I see the world so succinctly - let alone 2000 years ago. Some quotes that resonated with me:

"Then what should we work for? Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring."
"Our words and actions should not be like those of sleepers ... or of children copying their parents, doing and saying only what we have been told."
"Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human - however imperfectly - and fully embrace the pursuit that you've embarked on."
"You can lead an untroubled life provided you can grow, can think and act systematically."

What I've Read:

Tools of Titans

By Tim Ferriss

For me, this was the right book at the right time. It has begun to change my life. In a way, it's like Instagram Reels in book form. It is a collection of succinct and memetic summaries of the wisdom of Tim Ferriss's podcast guests over many years. I've gone back and listened to the episodes of my favorite guests in the book, and honestly ... the book is better! Almost everything that made me go "wow" in the podcast is captured in a few pages in the book. Its bite-sized form is what makes it so amazing. You can pick at it over weeks or months. You don't need to read linearly; I certainly jumped from place to place frequently. Just flow through it until you resonate with someone. Because you will. And it may just change your life. Some of my favorites include Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Derek Sivers, Naval Ravikant, Scott Adams, Seth Godin, and Chade-Meng Tan.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

By Jack Weatherford

Very transformative ... shows how much of the structure of modern humanity emerged from an unexpected place. Simultaneously, it shows an exception to the rule of "history is written by the victors." The Mongols were the victors for over a century, yet much of the typical perception of them is negative. Their humanitarian violations (from modern standards) are certainly not as glossed-over and conveniently forgotten as those of Europeans, as Weatherford regularly points out.