About King Applied Research

"To understand the future, you have to take apart the past."

This is my lab notebook.

I work at the intersection of silicon architecture, embedded systems, and an obsessive need to understand how things actually work - down to the transistor level. If you're looking for hand-wavy abstractions, you're in the wrong place.

The Philosophy

King Applied Research is technically a consultancy, but really it's a statement: theory is worthless until you build something with it.

I don't just read about computer architecture - I rebuild it from scratch. The flagship project right now is recreating the complete Intel MCS-4 system in SKY130 130nm: the 4004, the 4001, 4002, 4003, all of it. Not a behavioral model. Cycle-accurate, transistor-level, manufacturable silicon.

Why bother? Because working within 1971's constraints - 2,300 transistors, 4-bit buses, 10-micron features - teaches you a discipline that gets lost when you've got a billion transistors to throw at every problem. Walking through what Faggin and Hoff actually built forces you to understand why they made every decision. That's the kind of foundation you need to solve hard problems in 2026.

The Engineer

I'm Jeremy King. By day, I'm an embedded systems engineer - seven years doing automotive BCMs, FPGA video processing, BIOS-level firmware. The kind of work where you're often the only engineer on the project, which means you handle everything: schematic capture, PCB layout, signal integrity, firmware, and arguing with vendors about why their reference design doesn't actually work.

What I actually do:

Silicon & Digital Design - Verilog, SystemVerilog, FPGAs (lately a lot of Lattice CrossLink-NX). Currently developing custom ISAs including RISC-4, which applies modern RISC principles to 4-bit architecture just to see what happens.

Hardware - High-speed board layout, embedded systems, the occasional high-voltage analog project. Recently finished an LVDS-to-MIPI bridge system that took way longer than it should have.

Reverse Engineering - Taking apart historical hardware to understand what the original engineers were thinking. The old NASA surplus components are particularly interesting.

Outside the Lab

I also own a cigar lounge, which sounds unrelated until you realize it's basically a networking hub where I trade stories with retired Bell Labs engineers over a good stick.

The Garage: I race a '99 Camaro with a turbocharged 5.3L making 650 to the wheels. Also restoring vintage electronics - anything with vacuum tubes or nixie displays. Currently building a discrete-logic nixie clock because apparently I hate free time.

Everything Else: Learning Italian properly (working through Nuovo Espresso, tracking everything in Notion). Collecting vintage IC reference manuals for identifying old logic families. Accumulating quality tools from farm auctions because buy once, cry once.

Follow Along

I publish two things:

Deep Dives - Technical documentation on architecture, silicon design, and historical reverse engineering. The kind of detail you'd actually need to reproduce the work.

Lab Reports - Weekly updates on whatever I'm currently fighting with in the lab, plus occasional travel photos and opinions on tools.

If you care about how hardware actually works - not the marketing version, the real version - subscribe.