Zachary Nelson
R&D Engineer Hardware 2 at Broadcom
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZachary Nelson is an R&D hardware engineer with a decade of hands-on experience, currently focusing on accelerator design and multicore validation at Broadcom while completing an M.Eng. in Computer Engineering at Cornell. His master’s work balances speed, memory bandwidth, die area, and energy by combining systolic arrays, custom/packed data types, and an FPGA-backed multicore test harness that cross-checks results against NumPy models at scale. He has a strong teaching and mentorship background from multiple TA and instructor roles, and has led the electrical subteam on an autonomous bike project where he wrote microcontroller routines that outperformed standard libraries by 50–100x. Beyond hardware, Zachary contributes to a new programming language, Allo, debugging compilers and building numeric libraries, and profiles models like GPT-2 and BERT to squeeze out computational gains. He blends practical systems engineering with research rigor—often comparing hand-written HLS implementations to higher-level language results—to deliver measurable performance improvements.
10 years of coding experience
Hich School, Biotechnology, Hich School, Biotechnology at The High School for Math, Science and EngineeringMaster of Engineering - MEng, Computer Engineering, Master of Engineering - MEng, Computer Engineering at Cornell University
Github Skills (10)
asic8
fpga8
dsl8
hardware8
git-fetch8
merge6
fetch5
branches5
compiler4
ruby3
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
thezenelson/Learning_Java
Dec 2015 - Feb 2018
Contributions:10 commits, 9 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 1 month
thezenelson/Learning_HTML
Jan 2016 - Feb 2018
Contributions:5 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 1 month
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