MSEE · ASIC / PHY Engineer · Aircraft Navigator · Artist · Science Communicator
Justin A. Fritz is a hardware engineer, artist, and science communicator. He holds an MSEE from Rice University and a BS in Electrical Engineering (summa cum laude) from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Over more than a decade of industry work he has owned physical layer implementations across wireless communications, computational imaging, AR/VR silicon, and HBM memory systems — from the RF front end to the die-to-die interface.
The throughline across every role is the same: build a compressed, mathematically rigorous model first. Let the model answer the hard questions. Then elaborate it into silicon. At Freescale he designed the digital RX PHY for BLE, ANT+, and (G)FSK, achieving a 3 dB sensitivity improvement while reducing area and power. At Xilinx he implemented a polar FEC codec before polar codes were adopted into the 3GPP 5G NR standard — working from the mathematics when the engineering community had not yet converged on an approach. At Microsoft he owned the display and sensor subsystem on HoloLens v2 silicon and contributed FPGA design to Azure cloud infrastructure. The polar FEC story and the HBM4 analysis are instances of the same method: understand the physics, write the minimal model, elaborate.
Before engineering, Fritz served as a KC-130 Aerial Navigator and Navigation Instructor in the United States Marine Corps (VMGR-352, San Diego). Navigation at that level is dead reckoning: a human executing a Kalman filter in real time, integrating incomplete sensor data under time pressure and producing a single-page flight plan that encodes everything the crew needs to execute the mission. That document is the compressed model. The mission is its elaboration. The same logic runs through every piece of technical work he has done since.
In 2022 Fritz founded The Canonical Art LLC, an independent research and art practice. TCA develops high-efficiency VR/AR optical waveguides, low-power sensing solutions, RF modulation technologies, and classical and quantum optical computation PHYs for data centers — alongside the conceptual art practice and published research that make the underlying framework explicit. The hand-drawn Atomic Process diagrams, produced before ChatGPT was publicly available, mapped human creative cognition onto a structure isomorphic with LSTM. That observation became the core argument of the 2026 paper The Art of Art.
TCA operates worldwide. Fritz is a recurring presenter at Nerd Nite and available for contract design, technical consulting, and collaboration with teams building on FPGA and ASIC platforms globally.