Computer engineering · Virginia Tech

Bringing creativity to life.

I’m a fourth-year computer engineering student building embedded systems, FPGA projects, and the software that connects them.

Portrait of Sophie Atkisson
01 / About

Curious about the whole system.

I’m a Computer Engineering student at Virginia Tech with a Green Engineering minor. From FPGA signal processing and SDR infrastructure to vehicle telemetry, I like work that connects design decisions to how a real system performs.

B.S. Computer Engineering, expected May 2027 · Green Engineering minor · Honors College Engineering Scholar

02 / Selected work

Projects

Hardware, software, and the integration work between them.

01 / FPGA + AUDIO

DE1-SoC Rhythm Game

Built a real-time rhythm game in SystemVerilog with custom VGA graphics, button-timing feedback, and PWM audio synthesis through GPIO.

SystemVerilogQuartusVGA
02 / SENIOR DESIGN

Automatic Gear Inspection

Developing a system for SEW-EURODRIVE to detect and localize defects from 10 µm to over 10 mm across helical, helical-bevel, and worm gears, with automated OK/NOK results.

SensorsInspectionSystems integration
03 / TELEMETRY

SolarCar at Virginia Tech

Leading a seven-person telemetry team building a pit crew UI and data pipeline with ESP32 sensor collection over SPI and LoRa transmission. Built Python route analysis tools using mapping data.

PythonRFTelemetry
04 / SEMICONDUCTORS

IC Layout in Hiroshima

Designed NMOS, PMOS, and CMOS inverter layouts during a U.S.–Japan semiconductor intensive and characterized devices with I–V measurements.

L-EditCMOSDevice characterization
05 / EMBEDDED + CAN

OBD-II Car Telemetry

Designing a CAN-based data logger and C firmware to decode and display live engine data, including RPM, speed, and temperature.

CCAN busMicrocontrollers
03 / Experience

In practice

FPGA and Systems Software Intern

Parsons Corporation

Modified VHDL signal-processing IP for QSFP/Aurora streaming, assessed FPGA boards for FIR workloads, and built C++/Docker tooling to integrate MATLAB signal files into an SDR environment.

Back End Software Development Intern

Parsons Corporation

Worked on event-driven SDR scheduling and Java webserver file-handling, including HTTP endpoints, data transfer objects, PostgreSQL, and Docker-based integration.

Undergraduate Learning Assistant

Virginia Tech · Bradley Department of ECE

Mentored 26 teams building automated blood pressure monitors, debugging Arduino/C++ code and analog circuits, and assembling pumps, valves, and other hardware.

04 / Contact

Let’s connect.

I’m interested in embedded systems, FPGA development, and hands-on engineering teams.

Toolkit

C / C++PythonVerilog / SystemVerilogVHDLMATLABVivadoQuartusModelSimLinuxGitDockerPostgreSQLUART / SPI / I2CMandarin Chinese