The physical world has always intrigued me. I feed my curiosity by constructing gadgets and conducting experiments. In retrospect, even the experiments that initially seemed simple took me a long time to thoroughly explore. For me, the process of exploration is more interesting than the final result.

I was obsessed with building paper airplanes. I wanted them to soar and travel far. My initial designs had limited success. The plane’s path was neither smooth nor straight. I watched YouTube videos and tried different folding patterns for the body and added wingtips. The flight became smoother. I then wondered how I can make the plane go up, or down, or even turn. I researched again and created flaps on the back of the wings. Then I added the flaps at the front. I tried different flap inclinations. I refined the design by adding a weight, a paper clip, to the nose of the plane. I kept changing the weights to ensure a straighter flight. Then I changed the plane’s structure to carry some load – a few pens at a time. I worked on this for several weeks until the plane’s trajectory became smooth. Despite the fact that every addition required multiple iterations, I enjoyed this process of continuous learning and refinement.

At a time, I wondered how sound systems worked. I did some preliminary research about the inner workings of a speaker, and then I built a speaker of my own with a cylindrical magnet and a coil of wire. I made a rigid paper sleeve that smoothly moved along the magnet and wound the coil around it. Then, I attached an aluminum foil diaphragm to the paper sleeve. To structurally support the wobbly pieces of my crudely made speaker, I built a contraption using Lego blocks. Lastly, I trimmed an old headphone jack and connected my speaker to my iPad. The speaker worked! I could hear familiar sounds emanating from the diaphragm. But, it was barely audible and noisy. So, I sought help from my dad, who initially suggested using a stronger magnet and more windings. I incorporated my dad’s suggestions, and I also upgraded the housing of my speaker using foam, then thick paper, and finally wood. Furthermore, since the aluminum foil ripped easily, I switched the diaphragm to a combination of paper and cloth. After applying these modifications, I could see a noticeable improvement in the quality and volume of sound from my speaker, but it still was not as loud as I wanted it to be. After learning about amplifier circuits online, I built a single-stage amplifier circuit using a discrete transistor. Finally, the sound output was amazing! Through this experiment, I learned electromagnetism, electric circuits, transistor operation, and amplification. Even after several iterations, it is still a work in progress as I plan to explore multiple-stage amplifier circuits to boost the sound level and also create separate speakers for low and high frequencies.

I have explored different science concepts each year over the past few years. To study the bending of light around the edges of objects, I passed laser light of various frequencies through a narrow slit, observed the diffraction patterns it made, and analyzed their interference using geometry during fifth grade. After learning that blue light can disturb sleep, I performed experiments to determine the amount of “blueness” in household light sources (LED bulbs, computer monitors, phone screens) using a spectrophotometer during sixth grade. Subsequently, I wanted to explore the physics of sound, and, to investigate the principles behind sound reduction, I studied the reflection of sound waves through open tubes and the resulting amplification and attenuation due to interference during seventh grade. The latter two projects were recognized at the Synopsys Science Fair. In eighth grade, I conducted an experiment to determine the amount of fatigue in finger muscles caused by everyday tasks such as writing, texting or typing by recording electromyography signals and analyzing their frequency distribution.

One of my recent projects was about speeding up the design process of digital circuits. Having used the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi for some of my earlier experiments, I was curious about how they work and about the design of such electronic devices. This exploration led me to learn about the fascinating process of the design of digital integrated circuits and their manufacture using semiconductors. A time-consuming step in the design process is determining the time it takes for the building blocks, called cells, of such integrated circuits to complete their task. This task is accomplished using a large number of transistor-level simulations of such cells. I explored a deep learning method to accelerate this task with promising results.

After completing this project, I was interested in investigating other applications of machine learning in the field of integrated circuit design. I reached out to Prof. Vidya Chhabria of Arizona State University and have been working as a research intern with her since November 2022. My current focus is on developing tools and methods to ensure correct operation and faster design turnaround time of integrated circuits considering power delivery network (PDN) effects. For more information, please see the abstract in the link here.