STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

I am Nadathur Rajagopalan Satish studying in the Indian Institute of Technology,

Kharagpur in the department of Computer Science and Engineering. I shall be graduating
in May 2003 and have decided to pursue a career in research in Computer Science. I am
applying to the Ph.D. program in the Computer Science department.

Fields of interest
I am interested in the field of formal verification of embedded systems. I am also
interested in design of embedded system processors. The trend today is away from
general-purpose processors and towards processors oriented towards a particular
application. This has already brought about tremendous changes in design and
verification of systems. The desire to become a part of this revolution has led me to opt
for a research career in this field. In the long term, I wish to pursue a career that enables
me to do intellectually stimulating work in a field with relevance to the present-day
world. It is with this long-term plan in view that I wish to pursue a Ph.D. degree.

Research problems I have worked on

My first brush at research was in the summer of my sophomore year (2001) when
I did a project under Dr. P.P. Chakrabarti (Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur)
when I had to develop algorithms for false path detection in a digital circuit that was
stored in a database. Though the method that I came up with could not be fully
implemented, I realized that research is exciting as well as challenging.
My interest in Embedded Systems arose mainly as a result of a training I
underwent in National Semiconductors Ltd., Munich, Germany in the summer of 2002. I
was exposed to their latest embedded chip designs. My job was to develop a cycle-
accurate SystemC simulator for one such chip. This experience proved to be a great
learning experience. I learnt of actual methods that are actually used in the industry. I
went on to find out that the processor they were using had two particular cases where a
cycle was being wasted. After developing the simulator, I had to verify the simulator
against the actual verilog code using specman tests.
I then chose as my final year dissertation topic: “Verification of simulators for
instruction set architectures by formal methods” under Professors P.P. Chakrabarti
and Rajeev Kumar in the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. The idea was to
look for a representation of a sequence of instructions that was canonical. I am currently
working on a method of using *BMD’s as a canonical structure for verifying two pieces
of straight-line code for the CR series of chips. It could be used for speeding up
simulation, as also mapping certain sequences of instructions into potentially smaller
sequences which are functionally equivalent. Such an area of research, which has
applications (in this case code optimization), is of immense interest to me.
Academic Background
The courses in Computer Architecture (Parts-I and II) that I have taken and
Embedded Systems that I am taking will provide a strong background for research work
in my field. I have consistently been top of my class in school and am currently top of my
college. I have been awarded the “Aditya Birla Scholarship” which is given to ten
students from all over the country for academic achievements and leadership skills.

Why UIUC
UIUC is one of the most reputed universities with renowned faculty in this field. I am
especially interested in working with Prof. Daniel Reed, Prof. David Padua or Prof. Josep
Torrellas. I am interested in working in the Delphi or Perfect&Spec projects in the Polaris
Research Group as also in the Pablo Research Group’s Performance Analysis Techniques.
I was especially impressed by Daniel A. Reed, David A. Padua, Ian T. Foster, Dennis B.
Gannon, and Barton P. Miller, "Delphi: An Integrated, Language-Directed Performance
Prediction, Measurement, and Analysis Environment" Frontiers '99: The 7th Symposium
on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation and by J. Martinez and J. Torrellas.
Speculative Synchronization: Applying Thread-Level Speculation to Parallel
Applications. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Architectural Support
for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), October, 2002
Working with such renowned professors will be a privilege and would give me the
opportunity to contribute something original to the field.

Why research
The exposure to research that I have obtained during my undergraduate studies
has instilled in me an appreciation that it is research that provides much of the cutting-
edge technology found in industry today. The desire to produce something new has
driven me into making my choice of program. I intend to pursue a research career and a
Ph.D. will offer me an ideal background.
I look forward to joining as a graduate student in your department and having a
long and mutually profitable association with your University.