Hi I write to you with great enthusiasm and an immense admiration for

considering me for this position. As a graduate student with a major emphasis on

VLSI synthesis and FPGA design & my undergraduate studies being in electronics
and communication engineering I have a sound knowledge of semiconductor
physics, device fabrication procedures, Netlist extraction, Device layout design,
timing analysis, DRC error checking, FPGA design using VHDL, device synthesis,
and also an excellent set of programming skills in embedded C, C++, Linux, Java,
SQL, PHP and multiple web scripting languages. My GPA 0f 3.95 bolsters my
academic understanding and practical knowledge of the aforementioned
concepts and technologies. I have also worked as a software developer at
cognizant technology solutions for 2 and a half years which has greatly expanded
my programming knowledge. I would like to provide you a brief excerpts of my
experience and make a case why I will be the best candidate to consider.
As a digital design student I have worked on multiple projects involving, physical
design, VLSI synthesis, device fabrication, Hardware design on FPGA boards,
Verilog and VHDL coding, writing test benches, Scripting languages like Perl, Tcl
and Linux shell, programming the processors using embedded C etc.,
I am an individual who believe that every electronic engineer should have
knowledge on multiple engineering domains in order to be successful in his
career, I took courses in signal processing, Computer architecture, Software
development and Database management systems. These courses played a
pivotal role in shaping my ideas and made an excellent designer who can think
on the broad range of applications a hardware system can have.
Before continuing to what research I am doing currently let me share with you
one of my experience and which shows why I became so passionate towards
hardware design engineering. I have been looking for an idea for a hardware
project in my final year. That is when a fascinating event happened that changed
my life. There was news on a journal that the first successful digital weapon has
been launched and its name was Stuxnet. I was curious and started to checkout
what Stuxnet was, it was the most interesting thing I have ever read. At first I
thought it was just a commonplace virus but I wanted to know why it was such a
big deal. As I was reading I learned that it attacked specific electronic devices
running on windows OS. As an electronics students it caught my attention. The
electronic devices which it attacked were PLCs on heavy manufacturing units and
Stuxnet did not attack any normal manufacturing units, it attacks the PLCs which
control the speed of centrifuges in the Nuclear reactors. It was responsible for
the damage of about 1000 centrifuges in Iran. My mid was blown, It was so
fascinating to me that I started to learn more about security and hacking. This
event shaped my future research interest. I wanted to do something as an
electronic engineer in the security realms. Thats when I stared my first project of
Implementing DES cryptographic algorithm on Hardware (FPGA). The project
earned me a best undergraduate project award.
After my undergraduate studies I got a job as a software developer and I took the
opportunity. But still there was some incompleteness. I was an electronics
engineer and I wanted to work on hardware systems. After 2 years I decided it is
time to work on my passion. I have resigned and applied for my masters. In my
masters I was able to find 2 professors who were working in hardware security at
UNM. I asked them for an opportunity to work with them and because of my

academic record, they happily accepted. My first projects were to study how to
prevent stealing/hacking security keys. I have learned that the primary reason
for any security break was the keys for all the electronic devices (no matter how
string the security algorithm was) were stored on a non-volatile memory and
these keys were very easily breakable by simple power analysis techniques (I
believe this is the technique FBI might have used to break the iPhone and/or
NAND mirroring). I started my research and found out that the best way to
encrypt devices is not based on algorithms, but leveraging their intrinsic
randomness. That is when I started working on Physical Unclonable functions.
The concept is simple, suppose if you have designed a ring oscillator, sent it to
fab and you checked the frequency of the fabricated cells, no two ring oscillators
will give you the same frequency as output. This intrinsic randomness is the core
to many of my projects. You can leverage path delays, voltage/current levels to
develop a digital signature for the chips. One of my first projects was to compare
different PUF approached and decide which was better. I decided to work on
delay based PUFs and under the guidance of my advisor Dr Jim Plusquellic, I was
able to complete many successful projects few of them were implementing Hash
Primitives on ASIC chip, Delay based pufs on ZYNQ 7000 SoC, and finally the best
of all complete security algorithm based on PUFs implemented on FPGA
board(ZYNQ).
All these projects and research work has definitely made me an extraordinary
problem solver and a very passionate electronics hardware engineer. During my
work, I have learned many techniques in VLSI & FPGA synthesis, automation,
testing, and many programming languages like Verilog, VHDL,C, Perl, TCL, Java
etc.,
My past experience as a software developer has helped me greatly in quickly
learning many new programming languages and played a pivotal role in making
me a successful graduate student. My GPA of 3.95/4 would bolster my claims. I
am also working as a project management intern at UNM and the skills which I
have gained during this job helped me to become a great team player and
excellent organizer. I support 7-8 projects at a time and spend 10-15 hours a
week meeting and coordinating with the project teams. I believe this experience
will make me a great leader and help me to manage any type of situations in an
organization in future.
So this is me, this was my journey so far and I greatly appreciate that you read
my story. With my experience, skillset and my continuous struggle to be the best
in any situation will make me an excellent candidate to consider for this position.
Please check my LinkedIn profile (www.linkedin.com/in/vkishorekajuluri) where I
have posted detailed documents on my projects. Please contact me via my
phone (505 492 8896) or email (vkishorekajuluri@unm.edu)
-Venkata