Dan Fiumara's Site

About

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dan Fiumara holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He serves as the Director of Instruction at NYDesign — a non-profit aimed at educating students about the world of integrated circuit design and the semiconductor industry at large. Through NYDesign he has taught over 300 students how to use open source chip design tools leading to several tapeouts on ChipFoundry public MPW shuttles.

ntfy - Supercharging Your Bash Scripts

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to take the time to write about a tool that has been invaluable to me across many projects. If you haven’t heard of ntfy and you run any kind of recurring or long running jobs that are hard to monitor, prepare to be mind-blown.

ntfy is a free pub-sub service with outstanding DX that makes sending push notifications to your phone an absolute dream.

Here’s how to get started:

Post Quantum Encryption Accelerator

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Silicon Post-Quantum Encryption Accelerator based on Learning with Errors

Introduction

Asymmetric encryption is an essential technology in today’s hyperconnected society. We rely on asymmetric encryption schemes to secure our communications every day. We also rely on asymmetric encryption in cutting edge finance tech as it fundamentally enables authenticating transactions on the blockchain. Current asymmetric encryption schemes are vulnerable to attacks from quantum computers via Shor’s Algorithm. The theory for this algorithm has existed for quite a while now, but no quantum computer sufficiently capable of utilizing the algorithm at production scale has yet to be constructed. Regardless, it is important that we ensure that our encryption schemes are quantum computer resistant since encrypted data can be collected today and stored until sufficient compute resources exist to decrypt the data. As such, many so called “post-quantum” encryption schemes have been invented and even implemented in production.

Amplifier Design

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2nd Place Winner in the 2023 Analog Devices IC Design Contest

For the 2023 Analog Devices IC Design Contest, my partner (William Schilp) and I designed a triple cascode amplifier that included a gain boosting circuit on the PMOS side and folded gain booster on the NMOS side.

Much was learned throughout this project. I’d say the most important takeaway is that analog circuit design is a very sensitive process. Even the smallest changes in design parameters can have an enormous impact on the functionality of the circuit.

RPIce

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A Custom Silicon Wristwatch Built on Skywater’s Open-Source 130nm PDK

Tasked with finding an interesting project for our independent study at RPI this semester, our group of five students got together and brainstormed ideas, looking for an interesting way to make use of Efabless services and their chipIgnite shuttle. We landed on RPIce, a custom silicon wristwatch that displays the time on rings of LEDs and showcases our custom IC chip directly on its watchface.