Talk: Wireless communications at the chip scale for future multi-chip processors

This activity will be held inside the many activities of the Women's Week UPC.

Computers nowadays are limited by the speed at which its internal components communicate. As a result, there is a lot of research devoted to creating faster, more efficient, and more versatile interconnects capable of sustaining advanced computer architectures. This is exactly the key motivation behind the WiPLASH project , whose overall mission is to exploit the unique properties of graphene nano-antennas to build, for the first time, agile wireless networks at the chip scale enabling the next generation of processors. The project will prove that this approach can accelerate AI processing by at least 10X, therefore anticipating a tremendous impact on the design of processors within drones, cars, cellphones, laptops, or in data centers.

Irem Boybat is a postdoctoral researcher in the In-memory computing group of IBM Research – Zurich. Her current research focus is on developing energy-efficient AI systems by leveraging analog in-memory computing. Prior to joining IBM – Research Zurich, Irem was a research scholar at IBM Research – Almaden, San Jose, California with similar research focus. She earned her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2020, her Master of Science (M.Sc.) degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, also from EPFL, in 2015, and her Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree in Electronics Engineering from Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2013. She was a co-recipient of the 2018 IBM Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award and 2018 IBM Research Division Award on neuromorphic computing using phase-change memory devices. She has co-authored over 35 scientific papers in journals and conferences, received three best conference presentation/paper/poster awards and holds 9 granted and pending patents.

Sergi Abadal (M’16) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. (honors) degrees in telecommunication engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 2010 and 2011, and the Ph.D. (honors) in computer architecture from the same institution in 2016. During his Ph.D., he was awarded by INTEL within its Doctoral Student Honor Program. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the NaNonetworking Center in Catalunya (N3Cat) and, since October 2019, as Principal Investigator of the EU H2020 project WiPLASH. From 2009 to 2010, he was a Visiting Researcher with the Broadband Wireless Networking Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. He has also been visiting researcher at the School of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2015 and 2018. He has co-authored more than 75 research papers and 8 book chapters. Since 2018, he is Associate Editor of the Nano Communication Networks (Elsevier) Journal, where he was appointed Editor of the Year in 2019. His current research interests are ultra-high speed on-chip wireless networks and broadcast-enabled manycore processor architectures.

The talk will be held by GMeet, the registration is necessary to receive the connection information.