Xiaochen Peng has received the 2023 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA). Peng is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and currently works at TSMC Corporate Research (North America) as principal engineer. She was advised by ECE Professor Shimeng Yu while at Tech.

Peng’s award-winning dissertation proposes an end-to-end benchmark framework to evaluate state-of-the-art compute-in-memory (CIM) accelerators by considering the hardware performance with the impacts from device options, circuit topologies, architecture hierarchy and data flow, as well as the software accuracy with non-ideal hardware properties. Her work provided the design automation community a family of open-sourced NeuroSim series. These tools allow users to explore different hardware specifications and find the best design options for their research on CIM accelerators. The NeuroSim series has been recognized for its comprehensive capabilities and has attracted many users, including industry researchers from major companies such as Intel, TSMC, IBM, Samsung, and SK Hynix, as well as researchers from universities and academia worldwide.

EDAA is an open nonprofit association, aimed at educational, scientific, and technical purposes for the benefit of the international electronics design and design automation community. In recognition of the importance of university research to the advancement of design automation and test, and to encourage young researchers to work in the field, EDAA annually honors four young researchers with an Outstanding Dissertation Award.

Peng will be honored with the award at this year’s Design, Automation, and Test in Europe Conference on April 18, 2023 in Antwerp, Belgium.