Graduate / "more than Moore" technology; SOP Graduate stuies -electrical engineering [6]

I'm new to this forum, and I must say I'm smitten. There's tonnes of extremely useful information for prospective applicants. Below is my statement of purpose for the graduate program at Georgia Tech, I will revise my other SOPs accordingly. Hope to get it reviewed, thanks!

Nine months into my tenure at the Micro and Nano Characterization Facility (MNCF) in the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Dr. Abdul Kalam, former Indian president and nuclear physicist, visited our lab. After a brief discussion with us, he said before leaving "I hope your work here will one day benefit society". It summed up the impact technology has on our everyday lives, especially electronics; I'm sure this essay even, is being read on a computer, a tablet pc or on printed paper. The engineering and the implications involved in scaling down these devices is more than one can fathom, this is best exemplified by the technology node now reaching 22nm. My goal is to contribute to this technological revolution through the graduate program at Georgia Institute of Technology.

The journey towards my goal began with positive experiences at SSN College of Engineering. Through the years I developed an interest for circuit design, analysis and its integration. My final year project was on design of power efficient multi-bit arithmetic CMOS circuits using adiabatic (energy recovery) logic. These circuits are ubiquitous in processors. Optimization of these will enhance performance of the system as a whole. With device scaling, adiabatic computing has gained much interest due to its lower energy dissipation. It verified the importance of having an efficient circuit topology. Our results were published in 2 international conferences and are indexed in IEEE Xplore. The 8 months spent on literature survey, design and analysis gave me a flavor of the kind of discipline required for research. Overall, it was a great experience.

Undergraduation bolstered strong fundamentals but the opportunity to work at IISc was a turning point in my academic career, everyday a learning experience. MNCF is a research center that houses a plethora of precision characterization tools. My experimental work here involves characterization and analysis of its results for various samples. I also assist professors in conducting courses on characterization techniques for graduate students of IISc. I became adept with a myriad of characterization and fabrication techniques in a short span of time. I also took up courses on nano-electronic device physics, its design and characterization and fabrication techniques for MEMS and electronic devices. This gave me an insight into the multidisciplinary progress of future electronics engineering, and the exciting prospects it holds.

The projects I've worked on at IISc best reflect this multidisciplinary progress, the first being studying the growth and electrical properties of Silicon nanowires. These have brought about a lot of interest due its exciting properties of high aspect ratios, electrical sensitivities and quantum confinement. The second one initiated by the Reserve Bank of India, involves studying material and structural properties of smart counterfeit currency notes, to help track sources of the same.

Advances in fabrication and characterization techniques have increased the drive towards "more than Moore" technology. Through my experiences, I saw a glaring need for continual development of these techniques for satisfying future scaling goals. Also, the transistor moving towards non-classical designs obligates the need for improved materials and interfaces. An advanced graduate program will help address such key obstacles for device scaling. Prof. Mark. G. Allen and Farrokh Ayazi's work provide potential solutions to these issues with their novel fabrication processes for MEMS devices. I would also be honored to work with Prof. Alan Doolittle and John Cressler, whose work involves incorporating such hybrid materials for enhancement of device performance. With cutting-edge facilities like the Centre for MEMS and Microsystems Technologies, a masters from Georgia Institute of Technology will provide enriching research experiences to carry forward for my doctoral studies, that being my ultimate academic goal