I'm a junior at the University of Michigan majoring in Electrical Engineering. My focus is on embedded systems and hardware design, with hands-on experience in avionics, PCBs, and hardware verification. I'm especially drawn to the intersection of hardware and quantum technology, exploring how quantum principles can drive the future. While my foundation lies in building hardware, I'm also passionate about software and firmware.
Relevant Coursework:
- Circuit Analysis
- Signals and Systems
- Electromagnetics
- Intro to DSA
- Intro to Computer Organization
- Principles of Optics
- Intro to Quantum Information Technology
- Electrical Engineering System Design
Quick Facts:
name: David Sanico class: 2027 major: Electrical Engineering minor: Computer Science GPA: 3.66/4.00 experience: Electrical Engineering Intern @ Rocket Lab Avionics Hardware Lead @ MASA Data Science Intern @ Pair Tech
PCB Design
Hardware Validation
Circuit Analysis and SPICE
Low-Level Programming
High-Level Programming
Hardware Assembly and Integration
Developed a network of 3 control and data acquisition PCBs as a critical component of the flight avionics architecture on MASA's rocket.
Each board interfaces with external pressure transducers and thermocouples, as well as onboard IMUs and barometers, to acquire data and send
telemetry to the flight computer. Each board also controls valves to enable precise pressure control and sequencing.
I designed over 85% of the schematics and layout.
Alias: Trident
Number Components: 501
Layers: 6
Team Members: 4
Led design verification for a satellite GPS PCB, shaving 4 weeks off testing by soldering a PCB, analyzing power regulation and latch behavior via LTspice, and verifying physical assembly using DMMs, oscilloscope, power supplies, and electronic loads.
Designed, ordered, assembled, and validated an interface board bridging a flight PCB to an automated test rig, enabling integrated and automated testing. Underwent full product lifecycle including design reviews to meet customer needs, parts sourcing with efficient costs, and in-house assembly and validation.
Developed and utilized a test PCB to analyze a discrete LDO designed for long-term radiation and thermal cycling, uncovering stability issues and preventing costly redesign through Bode instrument analysis, thermal analysis, and LTspice simulations.
Designed a low-side NMOS pulse driver PCB that streamlined board power supply testing and step response analysis.
Wrote firmware in Arduino to validate an onboard ADC, implementing SPI communication and data readout from flight channels to aid in board-level bring-up and testing.
Designed and fabricated my first PCB from start to finish.
Includes onboard sensors, onboard memory, Ethernet, SPI, I2C, EEPROM, and an STM32 to record and protect
flight data sent from onboard sensors and a flight computer. Also includes a failure mode to preserve data
during power loss. Banana-shaped to wrap around the engine.
Alias: Keylime
Number Components: 181
Layers: 6
Team Members: 1
Completed a series of projects that assembles individual assembly-language files (RISC-based architecture) into object files, links the object files to produce a single executable, and simulates the execution of the machine code.
Produced a program that simulates every cycle of a 5-stage pipelined processor with detect-and-stall, data forwarding, and predict branch-not-taken strategies. Simulator written in C, test cases written in RISC-based assembly language.
Added cache-access functionality to machine code execution simulator, acting as a write-back, allocate-on-write cache of tunable associativity. Simulator functions written in C, test cases written in RISC-based assembly language.
Built a C++ simulation of the card game Euchre featuring human and AI players, using object-oriented programming with inheritance and polymorphism to model cards, players, and gameplay logic.
Implemented a C++ machine learning classifier that automatically labels Piazza posts by topic using a bag-of-words model and probabilistic learning techniques, gaining experience with containers like sets and maps for natural language processing.
Created a content-aware image resizing tool using seam-carving to remove low-energy pixel seams, with extensive testing and debugging of pointers, streams, and abstract data types.
08/25 to 12/25
Created a self-navigating robot with steering, odometry, battery monitoring, sonar sensors, a thermopile, and a camera. Produced software to support PID-controlled path following, obstacle avoidance, heat detection, and computer vision with color-based object detection to simulate search-and-rescue of humans. Hardware includes BeagleBone Blue and an Arduino.
07/24 to 08/24
Created a system to automatically provide water and light to a plant with machine-learning image recognition to adjust moisture and light-hour thresholds. Used an ESP32 with firmware in Arduino to measure soil moisture and light, control a water pump, and take pictures with a camera and send to a Flask server hosted by my laptop. Created a Flask server to send the image to a Colab script that uses a YOLO model to detect leaves, then a convolutional neural network for each leaf to determine if the plant required more frequent watering and light.
03/25 to 04/25
Explored the principles of Quantum Key Distribution and the physics of light and photonic qubits traversing the atmosphere from satellites to ground stations. Researched various aproaches for encoding quantum information into photons, multiplexing for optical communication, and adaptive optics for satellite-to-ground transmission. Proposed combined time- and polarization-division multiplexing with time-bin quantum encoding to minimize atmospheric effects.
03/25 to current
Creating a simulator for basic 6-qubit quantum circuits with an interactive circuit-building tool, results for probability and randomized measurements, and support for entangled quantum states. Using Typescript for the back-end and React.js for the front-end. I'm working on this with a friend, and support for front-end features and entanglement is in progress!
01/24 to 05/24
Created an LSTM model designed to predict NVIDIA's stock price trend for the next day, with performance in RMSE and MAPE precision benchmarks over 10x greater than the MDST team's base model.
Libraries: Numpy Pandas TensorFlow Keras
11/19 to 01/22
Converted a semi-automatic pistol into a fully-automatic rifle with increased power, dual-ammo compatibility, tracer-ammo UV charging, and an integrated voltmeter. This was a fun high school project that introduced me to the world of electrical engineering.
Incoming Hardware Developer Intern on the Quantum Firmware team at IBM.
I helped manage the development of all hardware projects in MASA. I oversaw timelines and goals of multiple projects simultaneously,
wrote and maintained new documentation to improve team-wide standards, conducted technical design reviews, and provided guidance to
new team members.
I also contributed to a novel Hardware-in-the-Loop system that emulates analog sensors, digital sensors, and loads by helping to
architect the system-wide design and drafting initial board-level designs for multiple PCBs.
As a member of the Space Systems Avionics Team, I carried out the design verification process of a satellite PCB including assembly, physical testing, and SPICE analysis. I also designed three new PCBs for testing integration, which included leading a professional PCB lifecycle from requirements capture to validation as well as assembling the PCBs. Additionally, I wrote firmware to assist in the bring-up of a flight PCB by validating an ADC.
I led a team of 4 to develop a 501-component PCB to control valves and receive sensor data in our rocket. I designed over 85% of schematics and layout, managed task distribution and deadlines, optimized multi-vendor BOMs, and coordinated with structures and plumbing subteams for cross-team collaboration.
I created the beginnings of a Quantum Circuit Simulator (QuaCS) project (still in the works) at a hacakathon as a member of Tau Epsilon Kappa.
I was the designated Responsible Engineer for the flight recorder PCB for MASA. It was my first time designing and assembling a PCB!
I developed and tested three multi-stage Azure pipelines and five Python scripts to automate the scraping and ingestion of license data. I containerized scripts using Docker and Kubernetes for efficient deployment, and processed over 100 million datapoints from multiple state databases into Cosmos DB.