The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) has received two awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) "Chips and Science Act of 2022" — to enable rapid progress in new semiconductor technologies and manufacturing.
“This is a great pair of wins for Pitt. Not only is the technical work by colleagues in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering exciting, but it also demonstrates that Pitt is recognized as a strong contributor to the new national effort to better support the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem,” says Rob A. Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research.
Funding for two collaborative research projects in the “Collaborative Research in Domain-Specific Computing” topic was awarded to four faculty members in the Swanson School of Engineering, Jingtong Hu, Rajkumar Chinnakonda Kubendran, Feng Xiong, and Peipei Zhou. The project co-led by Hu and Zhou to develop a cutting-edge Retunable and Reconfigurable Acceleration Platform based on emerging racetrack memory and to enhance overall system performance and efficiency with collaborators from Northwestern, UCLA, and UTSA. The project co-led by Kubendran and Xiong combines robotics with neuromorphic architectures to enhance sensing and motor control in devices with collaborators from University of Washington and East Washington University.
They join two dozen other research and education projects that were awarded a total investment of $45.6 million. The projects are supported through 61 awards to 47 institutions by the NSF Future of Semiconductors (FuSe) program through a public-private partnership across NSF and four companies: Ericsson, IBM, Intel, and Samsung. The FuSe program aims to accelerate workforce development support and opportunities in chip manufacturing to meet global demand.
“The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Pitt is most proud to be the home department for two new projects sponsored by the FuSE program at NSF, says Alan George, R&H Mickel Endowed Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Under the leadership of Professors Kubendran and Hu, their two research teams will advance the state-of-the-art and develop students in semiconductor devices and systems for domain-specific computing.”