From processor project to professional pathway

Every engineering student graduates with a transcript. The challenge is convincing an employer you’re more than a GPA.

In a job market where hiring managers are hunting for candidates who can solve problems on day one, practical experience has become more important than ever. Companies seek engineers who have tackled real problems, debugged real systems and built something that works outside the classroom. Students know it, too. A degree opens doors, but increasingly it’s the projects behind the degree that get them through.

That reality was on Saivirup Akavarapu’s mind when he enrolled in CSE 520: Computer Architecture II at Arizona State University. The electrical engineering master’s student, who graduated in May, realized that he wasn’t content to simply learn how processors work. A processor is the chip responsible for carrying out the calculations and instructions that allow computers to function — and Akavarapu wanted to make one.

Working in ASU’s Secure, Trusted and Assured Microelectronics, or STAM, Center, Akavarapu proposed an ambitious side project. He set out to build a computer processor from the ground up. The work required months of testing, troubleshooting and redesign. Along the way, he gained firsthand experience with the types of challenges engineers face every day.

This summer, just weeks after earning his degree, Akavarapu will begin his career as a chip design engineer at Collins Aerospace. He credits much of that preparation to the hands-on approach championed by the STAM Center.

“It’s important to do things that spark that curiosity,” Akavarapu says. “The best way to learn is through projects that genuinely interest you. By building something yourself, you gain insights that you simply can’t get from studying alone.”

At the beginning of the fall 2025 semester, Akavarapu was looking for opportunities to deepen his understanding of computer architecture. He had long been interested in hardware design and had previously built his own computer from existing components. Designing a processor from scratch represented a completely different challenge.

Akavarapu knew he wanted to work with Michel Kinsy, an associate professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, and director of the STAM Center. Akavarapu had been looking for opportunities to collaborate with Kinsy for some time, drawn by the faculty member’s reputation as an expert in secure microelectronics and his willingness to let students tackle ambitious challenges.

When Akavarapu proposed creating his own processor, Kinsy embraced the idea.

“Projects like this bridge the gap between knowing and doing,” Kinsy says. “When students take ownership of a challenging problem, they develop the technical judgment, persistence and confidence that employers are looking for.”

Akavarapu soon discovered that the project would be an exercise in patience.

Over the course of the semester, he started with simple digital circuits and gradually combined them into larger and more sophisticated systems. Each new piece had to work on its own before it could become part of the larger design. As the processor grew, so did the complexity of the problems he needed to solve. Computer science and engineering doctoral students Mishel Paul and Eric Jahns also played an important role by supervising and assisting Akavarapu as he worked through the project’s technical challenges.

By the end, he had built a functioning processor based on RISC-V, a popular open-source computer architecture used by engineers and researchers around the world for prototyping and testing computer systems. To demonstrate that the processor worked correctly, he programmed it to calculate a series of numbers and display the results on the board.

As a final test, the processor could successfully run a Fibonacci sequence program. But the project also taught him something every engineer eventually learns. Success depends on systematically finding and fixing mistakes.

“The project taught me that engineering isn’t about getting it right the first time. It’s about figuring out why it didn’t work,” he says. “Most of the time I spent was on testing and changing my code rather than actually coding from the get-go.”

Building the processor was only part of the assignment. With Kinsy’s encouragement, Akavarapu also shared his work with classmates, walking them through both the finished design and the process that produced it.

The presentation challenged him to explain complex ideas clearly, something engineers often have to do during their careers.

Akavarapu says he was surprised that students were less interested in what the processor could do than how it had been built. They wanted to understand the decisions, tradeoffs and troubleshooting strategies that transformed a collection of circuits into a functioning system.

For leaders in the STAM Center, that curiosity is exactly the point. The center’s project-based approach encourages students to move beyond theory and tackle problems that resemble the challenges they will encounter in industry. Through the process, they develop not only technical skills, but also the ability to communicate, collaborate and adapt when things don’t go according to plan.

Those experiences helped prepare Akavarapu for his next step as a chip design engineer at Collins Aerospace, where he will apply many of the same skills he developed through the project.

“The projects turned what I learned in class into something I could actually show employers,” he says.

When he lands at Collins Aerospace, Akavarapu will be building on lessons he has already learned the hard way through experimentation, failure and persistence. The processor was a class project. The skills it taught him are the foundation of his career.