Prof. Volker Sorger (PI) and Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi (co-PI), who, along with their collaborator from Princeton University (Professor Pruncal), have been awarded $1.33M for their project "Collaborative Research: Nanophotonic Neuromorphic Computing”. The GW portion for this project is $830K. This 3-year project is funded jointly by the National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) under the highly competitive and prestigious Energy-Efficient Computing: from Devices to Architectures (E2CDA) program.
The E2CDA program addresses the problem that future performance improvements across the board are now severely limited by the amount of energy it takes to manipulate, store, and critically, transport data. Under this innovative and interdisciplinary project, the PIs will develop future nano-photonic neuromorphic processors, inspired by the brain. This project is a part of a longer range vision and direction by Professors El-Ghazawi and Sorger to achieve orders of magnitude improvements over today’s computing technologies through nano-photonic enabled computing (NEC), using innovative principles for processing and architectures that depart from the traditional von Neumann digital computer systems and their limitations.