Although it has been raining frequently these past few days, today we caught a break and got to enjoy a nice sunny day. We met up with Long at our usual spot and made our way to the subway to go and visit Century Park. Century Park is the largest park in Shanghai,and it covers roughly 140 hectares or 346 acres. After we got off the subway, we were met by a few students from the tech tour Friday much to our surprise, and they accompanied us for the rest of the day. The park was very green with trees, shrubs, and flowers, and it had a large lake in the center. We explored various rock trails that lead through the trees and bushes taking in the scenery. Some of the paths near the lake were very muddy, but the struggle was worth the view. The park was full of families doing different activities like riding tandem bikes or using paddle boats. Some people were by the lake fishing, and others were picnicking under the trees. After we looped back to our start point, we worked up an appetite, so we decided to visit the Bund for lunch since it was nearby. The Bund is known for being the financial center of Shanghai, and it is a famous tourist location for the huge malls, giant buildings, and the famous Pearl Tower. We headed to a mall and had dinner at a restaurant called The Bellagio. Since Long had a conference paper he needed to submit soon, he returned to the research institute after dinner along with the other students. The rest of us spent the rest of the day exploring all seven stories of the mall.

Last night there was an intense thunderstorm, however the rain was gone by morning. Today some of us got together earlier to have breakfast at a nearby bakery. They have breakfast croissants similar to what we have back home as well as other bakery goodies. Once everyone arrived at the bakery, we made our way to the research institute to begin working. With our oscilloscope testing finished, Samson and I began conducting transmission line pulse testing. TLP is a way to study integrated circuit behaviour and their response to electrostatic­ discharge events. Dr. Lou first gave us a rundown of TLP and its purpose, then he taught us how the apparatus worked and how to run it. Both Dr. Lou and a colleague of his developed the TLP testing system we were using; Dr. Lou developed the hardware and his colleague created the GUI. To begin we first use a probe apparatus to place two needles onto pins on an IC chip for contact. Next we give our test file a name, enter a few test parameters, and press start to begin testing. Since each test takes about 20 to 30 minutes, we spent the rest of the day testing pins of interest on the IC chip.

After we had breakfast at our apartments, we all met up at our usual spot to walk over to the research institute. Samson and Juan got busy finishing up testing the last channel on our oscilloscope. Once we finished we noticed some of our data did not match the predicted behavior we were expecting, so we decided to remeasure some of our values after lunch. We get our lunch at 11:30am every day, but today Long had us leave slightly earlier to beat the crowd at the nearby restaurant. At the research institute employees are given a 2 hour lunch, thus we are not expected back in the lab until 1:30pm. Long says after lunch most people often take naps for an hour or so before returning to work, so we all followed suit and took a nap at the meeting room assigned to us. When we returned to the lab, we spent the rest of the time remeasuring skew data points on our excel sheet. After lab time we decided to try out a new place simply titled The Place. Inside we noticed the theme of the restaurant was American; there was a picture of Harley Davidson motorcycles, a photo of Albert Einstein, a book shelf full of famous American titles, and other items like a shelf with printers. The menu also had many entrées in English; among them were lasagna, pizza, spaghetti, and other dishes we were all familiar with. Needless to say this place instantly became our new favorite restaurant. We ended our day by having ice cream at a local dessert shop near our apartments.

Although we got a break from the rain today, we did not escape the high humidity or the heat. We again got a chance to sleep in; sleep is always welcomed. During breakfast many of us noticed our food supplies were running low, so we planned for a trip to the local Carrefour market later in the day. Today Long arranged for us to tour SMIC, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. As the name implies, SMIC is one of China's largest semiconductor foundry companies, and it is headquartered in Shanghai. Since the company was not too far away from our apartment, we opted to take the bus for the first time. The bus was very similar to the buses we're familiar with back home, and it also had wifi which was nice. The ride over was very bumpy which made the back of the bus bounce very high; it felt like riding a small carnival ride. Because of the high heat and humidity, the walk from the bus stop to the company left everyone very sweaty. Once we arrived inside we were greeted by our host and the indoor AC. We began our tour with a short video summarizing the SMIC headquarters and its facilities. Afterward we took a walk around the central lobby, and our guide discussed several key highlights about SMIC. We were shown a small model of the headquarters to get an overview of the different buildings and their purpose. There was also a grand wall full of several patents filed by SMIC. According to our guide, SMIC has filed about 10,000 patents since its opening in 2000. We also learned that SMIC, UCR, and PKU's SHRIME partnered to open the SMIC­UCR­ SHRIME/PKU Joint Center for ESD Protection Design. Professor Albert Wang, director of the Integrated Circuit and System Lab at UCR, participated in its grand opening back in May 2016. Next, we saw a hallway which detailed the history of SMIC and its growth over the last decade. We ended our tour with a presentation by one of their staff who talked to us about Semiconductor Companies, the growing IC ecosystem in China, China's economic growth, and SMIC's plans for the future. After the presentation we thanked our hosts and returned back to our apartment. Later we made a quick trip to Carrefour to pick up some food supplies, and we ended our day at a nearby hot pot restaurant for dinner.

Another rainy day in Shanghai. Today we got a chance to sleep in as we did not have anything planned until later in the afternoon. Having purchased food supplies earlier, we all prepared our own breakfast in our apartments. At 2:00pm we met up and made for the subway, however this time we actually transferred subway lines to arrive at our destination. We spent our afternoon at the Pudong Library to stay out of the rain. The Pudong library is one of China’s largest libraries, and it aims to be a next generation library. The library was modern and very big; it had about six floors total. On one of the higher floors of the building there was an indoor garden with benches for people to sit and read. Thankfully, they also had a foreign language section, so we all got a chance to do some reading. We noticed the library had a restaurant on the bottom floor, so we decided to have dinner there as well. Afterwards we trekked back to the subway and returned to our apartments.