He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the UCLA School of Engineering in 1982, after attending the United States Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Nicholas earned a master's degree in 1985 and PhD. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 1998. His doctoral advisor was Henry Samueli. His doctoral dissertation on "Architectures, Optimization Techniques, and VLSI Implementations for Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizers" became the basis for the development of the chip that launched Broadcom.