Texas ECE Ph.D. student Shupeng Ning received a 2024 Robert S. Hilbert Memorial Optical Design Competition award from Synopsys for his work on “A Hardware-Efficient Silicon Electronic-Photonic Chip for Optical Structured Neural Networks”.

The team received an award for their project titled, “A compact 4×4 butterfly-style silicon photonic-electronic neural chip for hardware-efficient deep learning.” They used Synopsys Photonic Solutions software to design a chip that supports an optical neural network for next-generation neurocomputing.