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Welcome to the Chair for Processor Design at the Computer Science Department of the TU Dresden. This is a professorship created in late 2015 in the context of the cluster of excellence cfaed – “Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden”, headed by Prof. Akash Kumar.
Our team works on Approximate Computing, Reconfigurable Accelerators for Machine Learning Applications, Design Automation for Emerging Technologies, Reliability and Fault-Tolerance of (Multi-)Processor and Embedded Systems. Here you can find more details about our collaborative research, teaching activities and publications. Check our vacancies and do not hesitate to contact us. We are always looking forward to collaborate with motivated and passionate researchers that want to join our team.
Join us virtually and get the latest updates on our YouTube channel and Twitter.
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Chair News
Our chair has moved to Ruhr Universität Bochum
After a very successful 8+ years at cfaed, since 1st April 2024, our chair has moved to Ruhr University Bochum under the name of Embedded Systems. We would like to thank all our colleagues and collaborators at TU Dresden, over the years. We look forward to working with new colleagues and take on exciting new projects in both teaching and research.
PD Symposium 2024
Our PD-Symposium-2024 was held in the beautiful city of Prague. During the workshop, we shared diverse ideas in the domains of machine learning, approximate computing, security & emerging reconfigurable technologies. Moreover, we enjoyed three interesting talks on the topics of Edge AI, Neuromorphic Computing, and in Wafer-Scale AI Chips, presented by Prof. Huang Kejie, Prof. Ma De, and Prof. Zhu Xiaolei from Zhejiang University (China). Through fruitful brainstorming sessions and team-building exercises, the symposium facilitated strategic planning for the future.
PhD defense of Cecilia De la Parra
We celebrate the Ph.D. defense of, now, Dr. Cecilia De la Parra on the topic of 'Post-Training Optimization of Cross-layer Approximate Computing for Edge Inference of Deep Learning Applications'. Cecilia has been working as a PhD student in Robert Bosch GmbH since 2018. Kudos to Cecilia and thanks to the committee members: Prof. Diana Goehringer, Prof. Jeronimo Castrillon, Prof. Horst Schirmeier and Prof. Lukas Sekanina.
PD Group Day 2023
Our adventurous group day this year had quite Adrenaline! Klettering among the trees at the 10 meter height surely is one of a kind challenge. Have you ever tried balancing yourself on squeaky swings and hanging bridges? Shaking feet, sweating out of stress after 5 hours! Challenging, right? Well that is how we like it at PD Group, facing new challenges 😎
(The bruises and spasm came afterwards though 😅). Maybe next year we head for Bungee-Jumping 😜
PhD defense of Mehdi Moghaddamfar
We celebrate the Ph.D. defense of Mehdi Moghaddamfar (co-supervised with Prof. Wolfgang Lehner, Database group - TU Dresden), for successfully defending his thesis on 'Database System Acceleration on FPGAs'. Kudos to Mehdi, Prof. Lehner, and his industry supervisors, Dr. Christian Färber (INTEL cooperation) and Dr. Norman May and Arne Schwarz (SAP SE).
PD Symposium 2023
We held the PD chair Symposium this year, in a nice hotel and environment in Altenberg. Team-members have shared their recent researches and provided/received feedback from each other in different perspectives: from logic-synthesis (transistor-level) to implementation (architecture-level) and security, reliability, and accuracy (application-level). It was a two-day energetic and fruitful brainstorming, for all of us 😊
Two PhD Defenses in One Day!
Congratulations to Michael Raitza and Behnaz Ranjbar for successfully defending their PhDs. Michael's theis was on 'Analytical Exploration and Quantification of Nanowire-based Reconfigurable Digital Circuits' which was a result of our continued collaboration with NaMLab. Behnaz's thesis was on 'Quality-of-Service Aware Design and Management of Embedded Mixed-Criticality Systems', in collaboration with Sharif University of Technology. Thanks to all the committee members: Jeronimo Castrillon, Thomas Mikolajick, Diana Goehringer, Aviral Shrivastava, Hussam Amrouch, and Alireza Ejlali. We are happy that Michael and Behnaz will continue their work in PD chair as Post-Docs.
PD Group Day 2022
Our adventurous group day this year had many ups and downs! Jugging in the scenic nature of Stadt Wehlen, then hiking up to Bastei Bridge, and finally taking down hundreds of stairs to reach the beautiful Amselsee and Amselfall (Amselfall was 'under construction' 😄). Nevertheless, we again enjoyed our annual boat-rowing which already has become a ceremony, but this year in a peaceful lake without mosquitos 😊 It was a memorable day, especially für unsere fußbeine, after hundreds of stairs 😄
PhD defense of Shubham Rai
We are proud to share that Shubham Rai successfully defended his thesis on 'Design Automation and Application for Emerging Reconfigurable Nanotechnologies'. Shubham has been a supportive teammate and helped the reasearchers in his team. We also thank Prof. Giovanni De Micheli, Prof. Thomas Mikolajick, Prof. Walter Weber, and Prof. Diana Goehringer for being a part of the committee. We wish Shubham all the bests and happy that he will continue his work with PD chair as a Post-Doc.
PhD defense of Salim Ullah
We celebrate the first Ph.D. defense of the PD group and congratulate Salim Ullah for successfully defending his thesis on 'Design, Analysis and Applications of Approximate Arithmetic Modules'. Salim has helped the research of those that came after him. Also thank the committee, Prof. Jeronimo Castrillon, Prof. Diana Goehringer, Prof. Wolfgang Lehner, and Prof. Sri Parameswaran. We are happy that Salim will continue his work with PD chair as a Post-Doc.
PD Chair at ICCAD 2021
The team of PD Chair presented three work at ICCAD-21, one of the top venues in hardware/software design. The joint projects are accomplished in collaboration with Infineon, IFTE, and Indian Institute of Technology Indore. Shubham Rai, Elias Trommer, and Dr. Andreas Krinke presented "dCSR: A Memory-Efficient Sparse Matrix Representation for Parallel Neural Network Inference", "RL-Guided Runtime-Constrained Heuristic Exploration for Logic Synthesis", and "Exploring Physical Synthesis for Circuits based on Emerging Reconfigurable Nanotechnologies" respectively . You will see more at our YouTube channel.
New PhD researcher
Siddharth Gupta has joined the chair as a PhD researcher in September 2021. His work will be on the topic of 'Computationally efficient deep learning models for embedded systems'. Siddharth's interests include approximate computing, machine learning, and embedded systems.
PD chair won second-place award in IMAGING SCIENCE Contest
As well-said by Joseph Beuys “Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives.”
To share "Die Schönheit der Wissenschaft" with people worldwide, Cfaed annually opens up a gallery with a selection of amazing illustrations, achieved by TUD researchers. The origins of these artistic visualizations are extremely diverse, from amazing behaviors observed under ultra-strong electron microscopes to deliberately-created graphics to depict scientific relationships of research results. The 5th exhibition this year was held in Altana Gallery of TU Dresden, in 17th September.
Chair of Processor design also joined this call and is honored that we can share the beauty of our research with the world through three images in the area of Approximate Computing used in Machine Learning (Zahra and Salim) and Silicon Nanowire FET transistors (Shubham). Zahra won second-place award out of more than 300 great submitted works and represented our illustrations to the rector of TU Dresden, Prof. Ursula Staudinger and many scientific visitors from different institutions. You can see a preview of her presentation on Cfaed's Youtube channel.
PD Chair in Spreewald
For group day we decided to mix both, relaxing in nature & experience adventure. After hiking in the beautiful routes of Lübbenau, our sportive & creative team decided not only to explore but also to open up new tracks of rowing in Spreewald Fließen (last pic)! It was an energetic and memorable day which brought much more, z.B. joy of itching due to mosquitos!
New PhD researcher
Mohammed Bawatna has joined the chair as a research associate in April 2021. He is working on the topic of safety and reliability of mixed-criticality tasks in multi-core systems within the project SARA. Mohammed's interests include distributed systems and middleware, big data processing and automation at the data center, high-performance communication and multimedia, and resource-efficient and predictable architectures for embedded systems.
New PhD researcher
Armin Darjani has joined the chair as a research associate in March 2021. He will work on the synthesis and tools for IP protection, based on reconfigurable transistors, within the project CirroStrato. Armin's interests include Hardware Accelerators, Reconfigurable Architectures, Hardware Security, and Emerging Nanotechnologies.
New PhD researcher
Nima Kavand has joined the chair as a research associate in March 2021. He will work on the synthesis and tools for IP protection, based on reconfigurable transistors, within the project CirroStrato. Nima's research interests include VLSI design, FPGA and reconfigurable devices, large-scale computing systems, and Machine Learning.
New PhD guest researcher
Ali Hosseinghorban has joined the group as a guest researcher in December 2020. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the Sharif University of Technology. Ali is working on the National Instruments project (Labview System-on-chip design methodology). His research interest includes Reconfigurable Computing and High Level Synthesis.
New Post-Doc researcher
Dr. Mark Wijtvliet has joined the group as a postdoctoral researcher in October 2020 and he will be working on the SecuReFET project. He received his PhD from TU Eindhoven in the same year, on the topic of energy-efficiency of reconfigurable systems. During his prosperous PhD, he was involved in assorted projects, including Blocks, an energy-efficient CGRA chip that is fabricated in 28 and 40nm technologies.
New Post-Doc researcher
Dr. Steffen Märcker has (re)joined our group as a postdoctoral researcher after he successfully defended his dissertation in August 2020.
PhD defense of Steffen Märcker
Steffen Märcker has successfully defended his dissertation titled "Model Checking Techniques for Design and Analysis of Future Hardware and Software Systems" in August 2020. He has been one of our passionate scholars in a variety of domains, especially on the topic of emerging transistor technologies. Check out his PhD thesis and contact him, in case of interest for a collaboration!
New Post-Doc researcher
Dr. Siva Satyendra Sahoo has joined the chair as a postdoctoral research associate in 2019 to work on the project PRÄKLIMA". He received his PhD on the topic of Cross-layer Reliability for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems from National University of Singapore, during which he was also a guest researcher in our chair.
Best Paper Award - DATA 2018
We are proud to announce that our paper "Column Scan Optimization by Increasing Intra-Instruction Parallelism", received the Best Paper Award at the Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications (DATA), 2018.