Cunxi Yu Receives NSF Medium Award

ECE Faculty Member Cunxi Yu has been awarded an NSF Medium Award from the NSF Division of Computing and Communication Foundations. Yu is named as the Lead PI for the award which totals $900,000. The award will be shared with Professor Zhiru Zhang of Cornell University.

Yu’s proposal, titled “Differentiable Hardware Synthesis”, will focus on Electronic Design Automation (EDA). The project will solve circuit optimization problems in EDA by using formal methods, machine learning and parallel computing. In today’s everchanging digital world, having consistent high-performance and efficient computer hardware is essential. Challenges in existing programs include limitations of synthesis solutions, such as unfavorable speed-quality trade-offs and inflexibility in leveraging domain knowledge. The ultimate goal of the project will be to streamline the production of computer chips with a faster design process, allowing for a less expensive and more adaptable operation.

Professor Yu joined the ECE department in Fall 2023. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, which he joined after PostDoc positions at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2017. His research interests include novel algorithms, systems, and hardware designs for computing and security.

Published April 16, 2024