Ming Gong

First-year ECE PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Ken Mai, working on digital VLSI and computer architecture. B.S. in Computer Engineering from Columbia University.

Research

I’m interested in the intersection of digital design and low-level systems: how hardware is built, how it fails, and how it interacts with software.

Current · VLSI Design Group, CMU

Hardware Fault Injection in YOLOv8

Which bit flips silently break object detection, and which layers to protect.

Embedded FPGA Routing

Heterogeneous eFPGA architectures and more efficient routing fabrics.

Interests

IC Design

Digital and analog IC, from transistors to RTL-to-GDS

Hardware Acceleration

Custom accelerators on FPGAs, and the cores they sit next to

Systems Programming

Drivers, kernels, and the software layer that talks to real hardware

Past Research

2025–26
Mobile X Lab, Columbia · Prof. Xia Zhou
Hybrid textile electrodes and impedance-monitoring PCBs for loose-shirt ECG · MobiDx '26
2025–26
Senior thesis, Simon's Rock · Prof. Michael Bergman, Prof. Stephen Edwards
CircuitSim, an FPGA-accelerated circuit simulator · thesis
2024–25
Barmak Lab, Columbia · Prof. Katayun Barmak
U-Net loss functions for grain-boundary detection in micrographs · poster
2022–25
Bergman Lab, Simon's Rock · Prof. Michael Bergman
Ultrasonic scattering experiments on inner-core analogs · first-author paper, PEPI 2025
2022–24
Zhejiang University · Prof. Xi Chen
ML models for pure component property estimation · Engineering 2024

Teaching

I like to master hard and interesting classes, and pass on my knowledge to others.

2026
TA, 18-422/622 Digital Integrated Circuit Design, CMU
2026
TA, CSEE 4840 Embedded Systems, Columbia
2025
Head TA, CSEE 3827 Fundamentals of Computer Systems, Columbia
2022–24
Think Tank drop-in tutor, Simon's Rock SR Archive

Personal

Part-time roadgeek. I map roads, buses, and rail in my head the way I map circuits! A long road trip is my favorite way to recharge.
Former PvZ YouTuber. The lawn still gets defended now and then.
I like archiving. I keep records of good and bad things I've made, and this site is the living version of that archive.