Hiandra Tomasi Receives Sparkasse Foundation Award 2024

The Sparkasse Foundation annually honors theses that strengthen the connection between academic research and practical application. In 2025, eight graduates of RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau were recognized for their scientific work at the award ceremony held in the Deutschordensaal.

Among the awardees was Hiandra Fonseca Tomasi, honored for her master’s thesis titled “Custom Processor Instructions for SHA3 on RISC-V Architecture: A Design Space Exploration for FPGA and ASIC Implementation.” The work was supervised by Prof. Norbert Wehn, M.Sc. Maximilian Schöffel, and M.Sc. Johannes Feldmann.

The thesis investigates the efficient implementation of the SHA-3 hash function in the context of IoT devices, with a particular focus on the RISC-V architecture. Given the challenges posed by IoT devices with limited resources such as computing power, memory, and chip area, the thesis aims to identify optimal solutions for integrating SHA-3, which is a building block of multiple post-quantum cryptographic algorithms into such resource-constrained environments. The research includes a comprehensive design space exploration, evaluating various implementation approaches such as software optimization, custom instruction set extensions, and co-processor interface instructions.