Xiyuan (Amy) Liu

B.S. in Engineering, electrical and computer engineering focus

Coursework: Radio Frequency Circuit Design, Electronic & Magnetic Circuits and Devices, Microprocessor Systems: Design & Applications, Digital Electronics & Computer Engineering, Advanced Systems Engineering, Data Structures & Program Development

Hardware design, bring-up, verification and qualification for avionics display control panels. Helped take six panels through final production release to the customer.

• Designed a level-shifted JTAG adapter in Altium for Ethernet-card programming and boundary-scan debug. It released first pass with no re-spin, and I led its bring-up, documentation and qualification.
• Ran DO-160G and MIL-STD environmental qualification with the test technicians. Diagnosed a radiated-emissions failure and fixed it with series damping on a high-speed clock, recovering three weeks of schedule.
• Authored 450+ hardware requirements and 300+ verification test cases in DOORS, keeping system-to-hardware traceability through five formal PREP reviews.
• Modified a circuit card layout and rerouted 10+ signal lines so two display units could undergo flash-memory proton-radiation testing.
• Wrote a PCB quick-turn guide defining design constraints for faster prototyping with less downstream redesign.
• Received the Display Department Outstanding Employee "Certificate of Excellence" (2026).

Replacing QICK's proprietary tProcV2 timed processor with a RISC-V controller generated by the RISC-Q framework, so quantum control firmware can be written with standard RISC-V tools. I designed the team's verification plan and built its verification flow.

• Designed the team's verification plan, a UVM-style differential flow with tProcV2 as the golden reference, plus legality checks and formal stress tests.
• Built the QICKEmu-compatible Verilator environment and the controller-level control-signal comparison between QICK and RISC-Q.
• Built always-on timing monitors at 7 pipeline checkpoints across 3 clock domains, and characterized 322 on-time pulses with jitter under one generator clock.
• Wrote 35 SymbiYosys formal tasks for RISC-Q's WaveWordBridge. They proved exact release timing and ordering, and exposed three ways pulses could be silently lost or truncated.

Developed a next-generation Electrical Penetration Graph (EPG) instrument for studying insect feeding. Final units were validated on three insect species across four lab visits.

• Developed four revisions of mixed-signal PCBs in KiCad for low-level biological signal amplification and digitally controlled AC/DC excitation.
• Owned component selection, LTspice simulation, board bring-up and rework.
• Designed a validator PCB for testing prototype analog boards, which the client adopted as a standardized test procedure.
• Final units produced waveforms entomologists could recognize on 3 insect species across 4 lab visits.

Leading avionics for Harvey Mudd's competition rocketry team, which launches dual-deployment rockets at collegiate competitions. Writing the club's first active-control flight computer firmware.

• Developing the club's first active-control flight computer driver in embedded C, with redundant sensing for reliable state estimation through high-g saturation during ascent.
• Reduced apogee-detection timing error by about 30% and ran a magnetometer interference study.
• Wrote a Level 1 rocket design guide for beginners and led build sessions for 60+ students.
• Team placed 1st, 3rd and 5th at Friends of Amateur Rocketry Unlimited contests (2026, 2025, 2024).

Studied the physics of latch-mediated spring-actuated systems through experiments and simulation, and automated the lab's recoil-motion analysis.

• Automated recoil-motion analysis in MATLAB, tracking elastic-material position with the Computer Vision Toolbox and smoothing the data to characterize energy efficiency.
• Co-authored the poster "Measuring the High-Rate Large Deformation Recoil of Elastic Materials," presented at the SoCal Soft Matter Symposium and the APS Physics Global Summit.