Based in San DiegoPacific time
For inquiriesle.derek2003@gmail.com
Derek “Q” Le
Computer engineer · ASIC / FPGA / Embedded
Experience & Education
Selected work
Capabilities
Looking for my first full-time engineering role, anywhere hardware and software meet.
Toolbox
A three-person mechatronics capstone that drives itself to the shooting zone, steers around obstacles and locks onto a 2 kHz IR beacon from about 15 feet away before it fires. A two-tier state machine in C runs it, and a 6th-order band-pass filter picks the real beacon out of the decoys.
Learn more about TQC_BotSoftmax with no lookup tables, squeezed into a 1×1 Tiny Tapeout tile. My first version was built for throughput and came in at three times the tile. The third, with fractional inputs and shift-only maths, beat an exact table on area and passed the full tapeout flow.
Learn more about Softmax chipA red-and-blue sorting game written from scratch in Verilog and running on a Basys 3 FPGA board, drawn straight to a VGA monitor at 640×480 from a 25 MHz pixel clock. It includes the optional bonus only a handful of the class attempted: randomising all eight balls from one shift register.
Learn more about FPGA gameBuilt and shipped, with the engineering team, an OpenAI-powered educational chatbot used across schools in Vietnam; prompt grounding on a vector database with LangChain so answers stay tied to each class’s documents; Vietnamese speech-to-text and text-to-speech tested against slang and accent-mark data.
Jul – Aug 2024Designed and shipped a playable level in Sweet Escapes, tuning layout, obstacles and spawn rates through iterative difficulty testing and daily reviews.
Jun – Jul 2021GPA 3.37. Coursework in VLSI, ASIC systems design, embedded systems, mechatronics, computer architecture, logic design, signals & systems, analog electronics and EM fields & waves.
Sep 2022 – Jun 2026Drop me a line
Work & updates
Based in
San Diego, CA
Looking for
ASIC, FPGA & embedded roles
Off the clock