Microelectronics is an indispensable driving force in every aspect of our lives, from mobile phones to satellites, household robots to autonomous vehicles, and personal healthcare to education infrastructure. After successful scaling and growth for several decades, microelectronics now demands fundamentally new innovations inspired by both physical and computational sciences. 

Welcome to the Microelectronics Co-design Research Group (MEC) at the University of Minnesota! Our research applies new understandings in computer engineering and semiconductor technology, focusing on hardware-algorithm co-design for energy-efficient computing. Through physical analysis and integrated circuit design, our goal is to advance the frontier in computing hardware, paving the path toward future intelligent systems. 

Group News

• June 2025: The joint effort, "HiVeGen: Hierarchical LLM-based Verilog generation for scalable chip design," led by Prof. Caiwen Ding, Jingwei Tang, Jiayin Qin, Kiran Thorat, and Prof. Zhu-Tian Chen, Prof. Cao, and Prof. Katie Zhao, is awarded the Best Paper at the first IEEE International Conference on LLM-Aided Design!

• June 2025: Our collaborative paper, "SpikeSim: An end-to-end compute-in-memory hardware evaluation tool for benchmarking spiking neural networks," is recognized as the 2025 best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, and receives Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award! This TCAD paper is coauthored by Abhishek Moitra, Abhiroop Bhattacharjee, Runcong Kuang, Gokul Krishnan, Yu Cao, and Priyadarshini Panda.

• June 2025: The third Workshop on Chiplet-based Heterogeneous Integration and CO-design (CHICO) is organized at Design Automation Conference (DAC).   

• April 2025: Tianyi completed his Ph.D. and joins Meta. Congratulations!

• April 2025: Congratulations to Nikil for being selected as the DAC Young Fellow, at DAC 2025!

• March 2025: Sharad won the Best Poster Award, Theme 3, at the CoCoSys annual review. This poster, "A 22nm Reconfigurable Chiplet for FFT and AI Inference," is in collaboration with John, Jacob, Nikhil, Ashish, Gopi, Jeff, and Jae-sun. Congratulations to the team!

• March 2025: Gopi completed his Ph.D. and joins AMD. Congratulations!

• February 2025: Zhenyu completed his Ph.D. and joins Ambarella. Congratulations!

• December 2024: Pragnya's research on chiplets and heterogenous integration is highlighted in the Spotlight on Research by CoCoSys.

• October 2024: Our work on HISIM is the winner of Embedded Systems Software Competition (ESSC) at 20th ACM/IEEE Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK). Congratulations! 

• July 2024: HISIM, a fast simulation tool for 2.5D/3D system design exploration, is released at GitHub: github.com/mec-UMN/HISIM

• June 2024: The second Workshop on Chiplet-based Heterogeneous Integration and CO-design (CHICO) is organized at Design Automation Conference (DAC).   

• May 2024: Prof. Cao is appointed as the Louis John Schnell Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

• April 2024: Jingbo completed his Ph.D. and joins Intel. Congratulations!

• January 2024: Prof. Cao presents an invited talk at Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), South Korea, on 3D heterogeneous integration. 

• January 2024: We receive a new grant to collaborate with Sandia National Labs on spiking vision transformers.

• December 2023: Our work on predictive modeling for 14nm cryogenic CMOS design is published in IEEE Journal of Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits. 

• October 2023: We contribute to two book chapters:

  • “In-memory computing for AI accelerators: Challenges and solutions,” in Embedded Machine Learning for Cyber-Physical, IoT, and Edge Computing, Springer Nature

  • “Overview of recent advancements in deep learning and artificial intelligence,” in Advances in Electromagnetics Empowered by Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, IEEE Press and Wiley

• September 2023: Prof. Cao delivers the keynote on 2.5D/3D simulation at the DOT-PIM workshop, ESWEEK. 

• July 2023: The first Workshop on Chiplet-based Heterogeneous Integration and Co-design (CHICO) is organized at DAC. 

• January 2023: We join the DARPA/SRC JUMP 2.0 Center for the Co-Design of Cognitive Systems (CoCoSys)!

• October 2022: Zhenyu receives the Best Student Poster Award at the 5th IBM AI Compute Symposium.

• August 2022: Gokul completed his Ph.D. and joins Meta. Congratulations!

• March 2022: Our collaborative paper on sparse training with crossbars receives the Best IP Award at Design, Automation, and Test in Europe.