Cover Letter

I-Shuan Tsung
istsung@gmail.com
Date: 2009/06/03

To Whom It May Concern,


My name is I-Shuan Tsung. I'm looking for full-time employment to continue strong hardware system and design skills in design, validation or verification related capacity.

After graduated from NCTU Taiwan, I knew that I have great interests in computer architecture and design field; hence I perused a MSEE in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. I followed Dr. Yale Patt in his Microarchitecture and Computer Architecture courses which provided me strong groundwork in computer architecture and design field. The most valuable content I learned from Dr.Patt was his methods of thinking and problem solving. It is a method enables me to conduct research in related fields, identify the goal, find out the missing piece, and propose and implement a solution. Later on I followed Dr. Earl Swartzlander doing research on floating-point computer architecture and design which forms the basis to my future work - graphic unit architecture and design.

During the internship in Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), I participated in a group designs and optimizes floating-point arithmetic unit for a graphic processing unit. I gained valuable industrial experiences on design R&D work and team work. I learned procedures of R&D project, aspects that should be emphasized, and problem solving methods. I am also practically aware the importance of critical thinking and communication skills. The most impressive experience during my internship is the brainstorming meeting in which R&D team members and university professors joined together and discuss about directions of future product, implementations of theory and academy value of the team's research results. I witnessed how innovation is implemented. It has a great impact on me. These internship experiences have made me more determined that ASIC design and related fields are the direction I plan to dig into as a career.

I am working as a contract IC architecture engineer for graphic unit vector floating-point core in Institute for Information Industry, Taipei, Taiwan. I am responsible for designing instruction set architecture for the pipeline arithmetic shader core in this graphic processing unit. This project is targeted to make a prototype product from research results of National Taiwan University for Taiwan graphic processing hardware industry. In this project, I am responsible to design a vector floating-point instruction set architecture from scratch. I am also responsible to design the floating-point pipeline processing core for this ISA. Then, I simulated it with Verilog RTL. The final goal is to implement this design on an FPGA board. This project gave me a chance to prove to myself that I am able to design hardware architecture from scratch. I practiced most of the design techniques during this project. I also use this opportunity to build up a design routine for myself and many working efficient routines for tools that I need to use daily. I took this working experience as a proof to myself that I am able to work independently and as a team member and also am able to apply knowledge that I have learned from school on practical work.

I have professional knowledge and skills of ASIC design and am willing to learn and work as a team. I have practical experiences of IC design from the industry and am very interested in works related to it. I understand the importance of communication and team work. I have confidence to myself that I can contribute to your prestige company. I hope that I could have a chance to contribute my professional skills to your prestige company.


Sincerely,

I-Shuan Tsung