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The Bias Point

About

Welcome to The Bias Point

I’m Jianxun Zhu (aka Jason), an analog & mixed-signal IC designer, researcher, maker, and lifelong learner. The Bias Point is my public lab notebook, creative playground, and long-term archive of ideas across circuit design, computation, AI, and the physics-colored worldview that underpins them.

Why This Blog Exists

I’ve spent my career building high-performance silicon while wrestling with a question that keeps returning in different forms:

What are the true invariants of analog design — the structures that persist across technologies, tools, and human workflows?

This blog is my attempt to explore that question from multiple angles:

  • technical projects and open-source tools
  • reflective essays that clarify my own thinking
  • high-resolution notes documenting research, experiments, successes, and dead ends
  • narratives that connect analog design with information theory, physics, and computation

It’s not a polished archive of finished work.
It’s a living record of how ideas evolve.

What You’ll Find Here

Open-Source Analog Design Tools

Experiments in simplifying the analog design stack — from ASDL, a structural analog language, to simorc, a simulation orchestrator, to various workflow utilities like yaml2plot and ltspice-to-svg.

AI-Native Analog Workflows

Notes and prototypes around differentiable simulation, hierarchical surrogate models, GPU-accelerated circuit analysis, and the long-term goal of building an AI-first analog design ecosystem.

Circuit Intuition & Essays

Short and long explorations of things I find beautiful:

  • biasing as a metaphor for equilibrium
  • symmetry and invariance in circuits
  • the arrow of time, entropy, and why forgetting is necessary
  • how physical intuition translates into design decisions

MOSbius & Education

Projects with students, hands-on experiments on the GF180 PDK, and reflections on how to teach analog design in a world increasingly shaped by AI.

The Philosophy Behind the Name

In analog circuits, the bias point is the quiet operating state around which everything else moves — the equilibrium that defines behavior.

This blog is my intellectual bias point:
a stable place to anchor exploration, before pushing into nonlinearities.

It’s also a small pun:
despite aiming for clarity and rigor, some opinions here will inevitably be biased.

A Bit of Personal Background

  • PhD in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University
  • Currently working in analog/mixed-signal IC design
  • Deep interest in physics-inspired computation, learning systems, and structural thinking
  • Obsessed with understanding why things behave the way they do, not just how to make them work

If You’re New Here

A few good entry points:

Thank You for Visiting

If any of these topics resonate with you: circuits, computation, physics, philosophy, or the messy human process of learning. I’m glad you’re here.

You can reach me via the Contact page.