Howdy, howdy! My name is Burak Biyikli. I am a UT Alumni who still hopes to get a PhD one day. At UT I found that I had a broad set of interests, including teaching embedded systems, interning in the IC design space, learning 3D modeling and welding, and doing research in computer architecture. I have found a passion for learning about the systems that power our world from every level I can see. Similarly, my coursework and degrees cover a range of topics from Math and IC Design to Computer architecture and Embedded Systems.
I started teaching and mentoring back in high school, where I was leading Mathcounts sessions for younger students. It was incredibly rewarding to see them progress, and that experience carried over to my time at UT. As a Graduate Teaching Assistant, I've had the privilege of mentoring over 330 students in embedded systems design, guiding them through complex topics like firmware development and SoC architecture. Seeing them succeed with their own ambitious projects—like building a Gameboy emulator or a haptic feedback mouse—has been a highlight of my academic career.
There's a sense of satisfaction in taking a project from just an idea into a moment where you have a reason to learn something new. I've had the opportunity to design and build everything from a custom 8-bit CPU at the transistor level to a 3D graphics engine optimized to run on a low-power microcontroller. These projects helped me better contextualize the work I did at Texas Instruments, AMD, and the FAST research group; letting me explore how modern computing works beyond what can fit in a class or what needs to be done for tomorrow.
Whether you're a former student, a new colleague, or just a fellow enthusiast, I'm glad you're here. Please feel free to explore my resume, browse through the website, and see what I've been working on. Thanks for stopping by.
How I learned to let go of small things like ‘value proposition’, ‘opportunity cost’ and ‘reason’ in order to embrace the transistor. In the later half of my internship at AMD in 2019, I was struck by the Muse. I had just seen the Monster 6502, which i...
Being clear about what you mean is a skill, but being clear while avoiding accountability for the consequences is a profession Everybody knows that lying is wrong. Or at the very least, that lying too much will get you in trouble. Everybody also knows ...
This is a simple tool that I made to strip HTML out of transcripts I was copying and pasting. I also ocasionally run into situations where there are many superscripts and it gets tedious to remove them all by hand. Just note that the tool is a little i...
A colleague sent me a link. Hours later, I was still deep in a rabbit hole of assembly, auto-vectorization, and benchmarking GCC vs. Clang. One of my long time colleagues Brendan sent me a link that you can view HERE. Naturally, I opened it as soon as ...
One weird trick to reduce the BOM cost of a design you might have used unintentionally used. Engineering is about tradeoffs, and this is never truer than when it comes to cost. It takes an awfully large number of produced parts to justify the engineeri...