Texas ECE PhD student Jiaqi Gu won the First Place Gold Medal at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA) Student Research Competition held at the 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). His research competition title is "Light in Artificial Intelligence: Efficient Neuromorphic Computing with Optical Neural Networks." 

In this project, researchers propose a holistic solution to enable efficient neuromorphic computing with optical neural networks (ONN). They explore various photonic circuit designs and software-hardware co-optimization methods to enable high-performance photonic accelerators with lower area cost, better energy efficiency, and higher variation-robustness. Their ONN project includes a compact and power-efficient fast-Fourier-transform-based ONN architecture FFT-ONN (ASP-DAC’20 Best Paper Award, TCAD’20), a noise-aware robustness training scheme ROQ (DATE’20), and a scalable and efficient ONN on-chip learning framework FLOPS (DAC’20 Best Paper Candidate). Their project also has a photonic neural chip tape-out under measurement.    

As the 1st place winner of the ACM/SIGDA Student Research Competition (SRC), Jiaqi Gu will advance to the ACM-wide Student Research Competition Grand Finals to compete with other 1st place winners from other ACM Special Interest Groups.

SIGDA is "committed to advancing the skills and knowledge of electronic design automation professionals and students throughout the world."

Jiaqi Gu is a third-year PhD at Texas ECE and is supervised by Dr. David Z. Pan, and co-supervised by Dr. Ray T. Chen. He received his BSEE from Fudan University in 2018.

In the last five years, Texas ECE graduate students from Dr. David Z. Pan’s group have won the 1st Place (Gold Medal) three times (2016, 2017, 2020) and the 2nd Place (Silver Medal) once (2018) from this highly competitive competition.