Design Verification Engineer @ ForwardEdge ASIC
B.S. Computer Engineering
Hi, I’m Anthony Manschula. I’m currently an ASIC Design Verification Engineer at ForwardEdge ASIC in St. Paul, Minnesota. In December 2024, I graduated Magna Cum Laude from Iowa State University with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. Along the way, I completed two internships with Western Digital, working as a digital verification engineer on the processor team, and one at Infineon Technologies, doing a mix of analog and digital verification and some digital design.
Through my classes and work experience, I have knowledge of SystemVerilog and VHDL, UVM, and ARM AMBA protocols. I have worked closely with verification environments incorporating ARM Cortex R8 and M0+ CPUs, and collaborated with team leads to write functional and code coverage in order to close testbench milestones. In addition, I have experience with Cadence tools in both a digital and analog context, from debugging and fixing RTL design issues to creating and simulating pure analog testbenches. I am also familiar with other object-oriented languages, such as Java, Python, and C++.
If you wish to download a full, up-to-date copy of my resume, it can be found here.
ForwardEdge ASIC St. Paul, Minnesota
ASIC Design Verification Engineer | January 2025 - Present
After graduating, I joined ForwardEdge ASIC in a full-time pre-silicon verification role.
Infineon Technologies IR HiRel Andover, Massachusetts
IC Verification Intern | May 2024 - August 2024
My summer internship with Infineon introduced me to analog verification. Referencing the IC verification plan, I utilized Cadence Virtuoso to create top-level testbench schematics with the appropriate variables that would allow me to test the verification objective. I also had to collaborate closely with other verification engineers on the team to ensure consistency across various testbench parameters (process corners, temperatures, supply voltages, etc.) and test methodology. This was critical for obtaining accurate data during regression runs, which in turn was essential for discovering and fixing design issues that could introduce project delays. Following that project, I moved over to the digital environment to overhaul verification infrastructure for the error correction (SECDED) block, designing a parameterized SystemVerilog testbench and set of helper utilities that allowed for quick and effective testing of potential changes to the IP. I was also able to utilize my knowledge of error correction to make significant improvements to the existing SECDED validation framework in preparation for samples of the latest tapeout.
Western Digital Rochester, Minnesota
HDD SoC Development Engineer Intern | May 2023 - August 2023
This was my second experience at Western Digital, returning to the CPU team for the summer of 2023. Again, my primary responsibilities were targeted at creating and debugging UVM testbench components to verify design features, and as such, I continued to hone my knowledge of SystemVerilog and UVM.
During my 3-month stint, I was focused primarily on the CPU DRAM datapath, as there were several new hardware features for the latest SoC revision that needed to be verified.
This time around, I was much more involved in digging deeper into the RTL to find design issues, as I had pre-existing knowledge of the design and how it worked, and also because I was able to apply waveform analysis skills I'd learned in my processor architecture class in the spring.
As a side effect of working on the CPU DRAM datapath, I also learned about CPU memory virtualization and some of its workings and benefits from both a hardware implementation and a software architecture perspective.
In addition to these new experiences, I also maintained a few items I had developed during my previous co-op, and continued to collaborate with verification engineers to write effective functional coverage and close out testbench milestones.
HDD SoC Development Engineer Co-Op | May 2022 - December 2022
During my first experience working at Western Digital, I was able to greatly strengthen my understanding of SystemVerilog. In addition, I gained knowledge on a number of critical subjects,
including Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), ARM AMBA protocols, and improved my comprehension of object-oriented concepts. Among some other projects, I mainly created and debugged SV/UVM testbench components that allowed further
verification of the current SoC revision. I developed system arbitration UVM performance tests that allowed for extraction and analysis of performance and latency data for various CPU datapaths, and applied knowledge of AMBA protocols
to create UVM scoreboard setups for several other design components. I also developed a unit-simulation for a critical piece of DRAM datapath IP, which involved creating a SystemVerilog testbench for the IP, as well as an accompanying suite
of tests to hit corner-cases not generally seen in the top-level environment. In addition, I wrote functional and code coverage in order to close on testbench milestones, and I worked with a subset of the testbench that allowed for firmware-like C-code to be loaded and tested on the design.
As a whole, my first experience working at Western Digital significantly improved my understanding of CPU subsystems on embedded hardware.
Iowa State University Ames, Iowa
Level 1 IT Support | August 2020 - May 2022, January 2023 - December 2024
As IT support for the LAS College, technicians are expected to utilize an enthusiastic, yet professional personality in order to
provide a positive experience for professors and students. We deployed and provided support for classroom and office equipment located within our
building, as well as remote and on-site support for software and hardware issues via the Service-Now ticket system.
Iowa State University
B.S. Computer Engineering | Completed Decemeber 2024
I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a final GPA of 3.87. I was on the College of Engineering Dean's List during every semester I was enrolled full-time: Fall 2020, Spring/Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Spring/Fall 2023, Spring/Fall 2024.
Woodstock North High School
Graduated with Honors Spring 2020
Academic Challenge Team and VEX Robotics member, McHenry County Honor Band participant, and Varsity Band Section Leader
Cyclone Racing Formula SAE Team, Powertrain | August 2021 - May 2024
The Cyclone Racing Formula SAE Team is a student-run organization whose goal is to create a Formula-style race car that can be entered into yearly competitions held by SAE International.
Members must closely adhere to the guidelines set by the team’s technical director, as well as the regulations imposed by Formula SAE’s organizers in order to design a car that is competition-legal (Left: CR-26, Right: CR-27).
FSAE Lead Tuning and Systems Engineer | May 2022 - May 2024
For the 2022 and 2023 school year, I was elected to lead the development of the vehicle systems and tuning aspects of the car. This role involved designing and maintaining a complete electrical system for the car, including charging, power distribution,
and wiring. I was also responsible for performing engine calibration, which relied on data analysis to ensure that we were extracting maximum power from the engine while remaining within safe operating limits.
Being a part of this team provided me with valuable exposure to engineering principles, and experience working in a fast-paced collaborative environment.
Freshmen Leaders in Engineering | August 2020 - April 2021
ISU Freshmen Leaders in Engineering is an organization that aims to serve as a method of outreach to current and incoming
freshmen regarding events and involvement at Iowa State. While we were very restricted in terms of activites as a result of the COVID pandemic,
during my time as a member of this group, we planned and executed a fundraiser for the ISU food pantry, and also utilized 360-degree video capture
technology to create orientation videos for prospective international students.
WNHS ACES Academic Team | January 2018 - May 2020
I was involved in my high school’s engineering and science academics team from my sophomore year to the end of my senior year. Every member was responsible for studying two
subjects that they would subsequently be tested on across several competitions later in the year. We placed first as a team at the regional event in
2019 and 2020, and placed second at the sectional event in 2019. As an individual, I placed first in the subject of engineering graphics at the 2019
regional event, and came third in the same in 2018 and 2020.
WNHS Band Section Leader | August 2019 - May 2020
As trumpet section leader in my high school’s top band, I was responsible for acquainting newcomers with the marching band program, as well as
planning some of the choreography for the fall 2019 season. I also collaborated with other section leaders to coordinate activities and build
relationships between all members of the band.
January 2024 - December 2024
January 2024 - May 2024
January 2023 - May 2023
January 2024 - December 2024
Iowa State CPRE senior design project, with Boeing as the client.
The increasing computational demand of modern avionics programs necessitates higher performance hardware platforms to support them. Among the various avenues that exist, one approach to achieving higher application performance is to utilize a multicore system. However, incorporating such systems into safety-critical applications like avionics presents a unique set of challenges when it comes to their airworthiness certification. The equipment manufacturer must be able to prove that the system is resilient to performance degradation due to shared resource “crosstalk” (also known as resource contention) from applications running on the platform’s processor cores. Our team was tasked with building a test framework that would induce sufficient resource contention on a target piece of hardware in order to facilitate more efficient airworthiness testing of embedded Linux systems. Boeing presented our team with several requirements, including processor architecture, system form factor, system resource partitioning approach, and testing framework design. The final design utilizes a hardware platform incorporating the recommended ARMv8 processor architecture, and supports the Xilinx PetaLinux framework, allowing for streamlined system image revisions. The system image includes the Xen hypervisor, which enables the user to partition execution of different programs to distinct processor cores and quantify the effects of resource contention on worst-case program execution time. Our solution includes a front end that allows for efficient collection of execution time metrics across a variety of program types and resource contention methods. The current version of our system meets our clients’ needs by providing them with a flexible framework that quantifies the effects of system resource contention on program execution time. Given that our solution is open-source, future developers may wish to make improvements in several areas, including analysis of contention mitigation methods, inclusion of a graphical interface for testing, and refinements to the results analysis tools. Overall, our solution is an important step in the landscape of modern multicore systems analysis, and its open-source nature allows for its continued use and improvement.
A more in-depth project description, along with other detailed deliverables, can be found on our senior design website. Additionally, the code is being hosted open-source on GitHub.
January 2024 - May 2024
Research project undertaken by myself and a Computer Engineering Ph.D student for an advanced data storage systems class. The goal of this project is to research and analyze the viability of using computational storage devices for accelerating tasks common to data integrity and ransomware protection schemes. We have identified research gaps in erasure coding and data security tasks and their applicability to computational storage devices and developed a proof-of-concept library (CSDGuard) using C++ and OpenCL that implemented I/O operations, computations, and performance measurement utilities common to those tasks. We then synthesized and optimized a hardware-based accelerator kernel using AMD Vitis High-Level Synthesis tools, and were able to observe up to a 70% performance increase utilizing CSDGuard over a reference software-based implementation. Our work was accepted to be a part of the poster presentation portion of the 2024 Massive Storage Systems and Technology conference in Santa Clara, CA.
January 2023 - May 2023
CPRE 381: Computer Organization and Assembly Level Programming. This project as a whole spanned several months, from February until the end of the semester, with the overall goal of designing several processors around the MIPS ISA with the final goal of comparing their performance. It relied heavily on applying concepts from class, including VHDL skills, piplining, hazard avoidance, and general knowledge of digital logic and the MIPS ISA. This project was completed in a team of two, with both members utilizing Git for version control. Due my partner’s high workload that semester, I was primarily responsbile for the top-level design and integration of the processor, as well as unit testing as features were added. All designs included in the below repository implement the core MIPS ISA, and will run an arbitrary MIPS assembly program (examples included). This project greatly enhanced my understanding of the process of debugging and fixing design issues, which I was introduced to in my first co-op at Western Digital the months prior. This project also familiarized me with the concept of design synthesis, and how different design strategies impact the critical path, and therefore the maximum theoretical clock speed of the processor.
The GitHub repository with the code for the project can be found here.
The best way to reach me is via email. I monitor this account on most of my devices so expect a reasonably quick response. Alternatively, you can reach me via a message on LinkedIn.
My email address: