Professor's Project Part of $16.3M Awarded to AI Hub by DOD
Funding supports research aimed at ultra-efficient hardware for AI applications
S. J. Ben Yoo, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis, leads a project to address large-scale issues in artificial intelligence at the chip scale.
Entitled "Energy-Efficient and Scalable, and Self-learning AI Hardware with 3D Electronic-Photonic-Integrated-Circuits," Yoo's research aims to demonstrate commercially viable and multi-purpose optoelectronic AI computing prototypes. The effort plans to combine "best-of-both-worlds" innovations in photonics and electronics, integrating them into a compact 3D circuit module.
The project is one of three in the California-Pacific-Northwest AI Hardware Hub, or Northwest-AI-Hub, aimed at dramatically improving the energy efficiency of artificial intelligence hardware. Together, the projects received a $16.3 million boost from the Department of Defense.
Co-led by Stanford University and UC Berkeley, with UC Davis as a partner institution, the Northwest-AI-Hub is one of eight hubs funded in 2023 through the Microelectronics Commons program under the CHIPS and Science Act. The goal of the Microelectronics Commons initiative is to strengthen the nation's semiconductor manufacturing capabilities and to reduce dependency on foreign sources of microelectronics.
