The correspondent
Tyrone Marhguy
Ghanaian. Computer Engineering ’28 at Penn, on a full scholarship. I build computers from discrete transistors to tapeout — and I set this paper.
I am Tyrone Iras Marhguy. Tomato is the machine in front of you: a 32-bit CPU from 74xx logic, boards you can probe, a journal for the arguments. The rest of this column is how I got here. Not a résumé with a CPU attached. The cool stories also live on Wikipedia, if you want the long version.
Early life
Born in Ghana, 24 November 2003. I am a triplet — Nikita and Amrita. We grew up between Kumasi and Accra, and for several years the family lived primarily on a parked bus. At thirteen I charged phones with a car battery and nails heated in a coal pot. Not because I was curious. Because we needed to survive. That instinct is still the method: understand the physics, verify the design, ship something that works on real silicon.
Before Achimota I studied in Kumasi and at Rising Academy in Ablekuma.
Achimota
In March 2021, Achimota School denied me admission because I wear dreadlocks. My father, Tereo Marhguy, took it to Ghana’s High Court, alongside the family of Oheneba Kwaku Nkrabea, who faced the same refusal. On 31 May 2021 the Human Rights Division ruled in our favor: denying education over hair violated the rights to education, dignity, and religious expression. I enrolled. I finished. The ruling has been cited since. Can’t afford to go to court again and have law students study the case for exams; iykyk.
The marks
2023 WASSCE: 8 A1s. American Mathematics Olympiad: national top scorer, gold, among 150,000. Vanda Science: silver. SAT: 99th percentile. 2024: a full scholarship to Penn for Computer Engineering, with other offers from Duke, Williams, and Franklin & Marshall. Now a B.S.E. at Penn, expected 2028, with concurrent master’s coursework in electrical engineering.
This fall
This paper is Tomato. Discrete logic through PCB tapeout. The dual-LUT ALU is inbound. The rest of the catalog is still on the screen. I am also joining Pennovation to research FPGA utilization, and I contribute where the tools actually run: LibreLane, Verilator, OpenFPGA. The first board, before this one, was an 8-bit ALU from 3,488 MOSFETs. Professionally: Vero Electric on battery management, Aragorn AI on production backends. I have taught through Fife-Penn and, this summer, AR/VR with Howard STEM Achievers.
| On the bench | What it is |
|---|---|
| Tomato | 32-bit CPU · 74xx · this paper |
| 8-bit transistor ALU | 3,488 MOSFETs · 1.24M vectors · the origin board |
| 16-bit MAC, Sky130 | BFloat16 · OpenLane · TinyTapeout |
| 16×4 SRAM | 6T macro · 22 nm · StrongARM sense amp |
| NASDAQ ITCH parser | Market data on Artix-7 |
| UDP/IP stack | 100 Mbps · sub-200 ns loopback |
Off the bench: beach, dogs, sudoku, biking. The other paper — portfolio, résumé, the rest of the tree — is tmarhguy.com.