Friend from Shanghai

On this lazy Saturday afternoon, I was watching March Madness at Harry's Hofbrau when suddenly my cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID and realize the call was from Tao!

Tao was a former co-worker. Both of us joined the same company about 6 months apart and became fast friends. We used to take walk every day around the campus, discussing everything from technical problems to career decisions to weekend activities. Both of us also shared interest in independent movies and skiing.

After a year of working together, Tao decided to move Shanghai, China, where he is an application engineer for Cypress Semiconductor's capacitive sensing chips for use on touch screen cell phones.

We had interesting discussion on capacitive sensing structures, the engineering cultures of various cell phone vendors, and of course SRAM designs. Tao held almost 20+ patents in various aspect of SRAM circuit design, but in our conversation, he told me he had completely forgot about transistors. In fact, he struggled to remember the term "body effect".

We also talked about his life in Shanghai. Tao told me his life is more balance now. He moved from Pudong to the Puxi, the older part of Shanghai, where life is more diverse. He is taking sketching lessons and playing soccer, things he did not have time for while working in the US.

We chatted for almost 3 hours, before jet lag starting taking its toll on Tao. We decided to call it a night, but it was great catching up.