About Me

Hi! I’m Chih-Yu (Andrew) Lai.

I’m a hardware engineer currently living in Taipei. I have a great interest in developing innovative software and hardware, so I am very excited to create this website for sharing my projects and experience with you.

I had been profoundly inspired by programming when I was young. In junior high school, I self-learned Visual Basic and wrote several programs, with one of them winning the first prize in a science fair competition. In senior high school, I learned C/C++ along with algorithms and data structures, and entered 2^nd stage (5~10^th place) in Taiwan Olympiad in Informatics (TOI). These series of events firmly established my programming skills.

As a person with programming background, devices I had constructed possess vivid and complex functionality. In college, I majored in bio-mechatronics and attained relevant skills for completing a variety of projects. I teamed up with schoolmates for developing an aroma alarm clock that can awake people using a specific fragrance and earned 40,000NTD in a fundraising event. During this period, I acquired PCB layout skills and the ability for practical usage of microcontrollers, IC chips along with different electronic components. I have lots of practical experiences for machine learning and data mining using neural networks (Python+Tensorflow), and won first prize in a big data analysis competition held by TSMC. I also have experience in designing digital logic circuits using Verilog learned during college.

My graduate research topic focuses on interdigitated array electrode chips applied to electrochemical impedimetric biosensing. I learned the complete microfabrication process for microelectrodes and microfluidic chips, utilized Raspberry Pi for developing a wireless and miniaturized website-controlled impedance detection device, and applied those to my own research. Accordingly, I wrote two full research articles as first author, and published them on a Q1 international journal (Electrochimica Acta). After graduation, I had worked as a research assistant in our lab and led a research team for developing miniaturized bio-sensing platforms.

Now, I work as a layout designer in TSMC, which is the world’s largest dedicated independent (pure-play) semiconductor foundry and the 30^th largest company in the world by market value as of 2019. We design layouts of the most advanced processes, and I am currently doing research within the field of layout automation.

[Download CV]

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Honors and Awards