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SystemX Alliance

SystemX Alliance Newsletter - May 2021

SystemX Newsletter - May 2021

SystemX (Virtual) Spring Workshop 2021 - June 2, 3, and 7

Stanford SystemX Alliance will host an invitation-only workshop on "Future Directions of Semiconductor Technology - from Atoms to Applications" over three days in June 2, 3, and 7, 2021.

For this workshop, we are gathering visionaries and leaders of industry and academia to give us their perspectives followed by an open discussion. All SystemX member companies are welcome to join in the discussion.

Why this workshop at this time? Unless you have been skipping the news these days, it is not difficult to know that chips are on the top of everyone's mind these days. Even President Biden held up a DRAM chip from Micron to make his point. But this workshop is not about supply chain or government policy. It is about our technology future.

Because there is a shift from 2D scaling to a plethora of new materials and new devices for further performance gains, plus a concomitant shift from system-on-chip (SoC) to heterogeneous integration, chiplet partitioning, and advanced packaging, the roadmap ahead for the semiconductor industry is not as straightforward as it was in the past. Yet, there is tremendous value to industry and academia to know what the future of semiconductor technology will look like and use that knowledge to plan for the future.

The goal of this workshop is to have a forum for sharing perspectives and viewpoints on what the future may hold in their respective domains. It is hoped that everyone in the food chain will gain from understanding the opportunities and challenges of an abstraction layer above and an abstraction layer below.

The workshop will be held virtually (so no travel is needed) over 3 days (June 2, 3, 7) to avoid Zoom fatigue and to cover different time zones (North America, Europe, Asia) as our speakers and audience come from around the world. For each session, there will be about 5 - 6 invited talks, each talk will be 20 minutes including Q&A. There will be a panel discussion among the speakers after the talks for each day.

We have sent our member representatives a formal invitation to pass along to their colleagues. You can view any updates regarding the Spring Workshop on our website: SystemX 2021 Spring Workshop. If you would like an invitation to the Spring Workshop, please contact our Program Assistant, Kiyah Agtarap (kagtarap@stanford.edu). 

SystemX New Leadership: Faculty Co-Directors Philip Wong and Amin Arbabian

Prof. H.-S. Philip Wong

Starting in the summer of 2021, Boris Murmann, our long-time founding Faculty Co-Director of SystemX Alliance, will take a well-deserved sabbatical. Since September 2020, I have resumed the role of Faculty Co-Director of SystemX after my leave of absence from Stanford. I will continue in this role during Boris’s absence.

It is a pleasure to introduce to you Amin Arbabian, of the Electrical Engineering Department, as the incoming Faculty Co-Director of SystemX. Amin has been the leader (with Tom Lee) of the Internet of Everything (IoE) Focus Area. Amin will bring new energy into the SystemX leadership.

This is an exciting time for our communities that focus on building systems. The world has recognized the importance of building physical “stuff.” Advances in hardware technologies are essential for meeting societal expectations of what technology would offer in the future. Simply put, we cannot run today’s information and communication technology systems on 90s technologies. Voice recognition simply won’t work on flip phones. More powerful software applications require more powerful hardware technologies.  If hardware technology fails to progress, then software applications will soon stall. On the other hand, no hardware systems can do without software.

Amin and I will be looking at ways to broaden the SystemX reach and collaborate with related Centers and Initiatives on campus to bring value to our members. We look forward to engaging with our members in the upcoming SystemX Conference in the Fall to plan for the future.

One of the bright spots of the past year has been our seed funding. We were able to allocate funds to six new research projects and renew five, which you can see below in the article "Six New SystemX Seed Grants Awarded" and on the SystemX Seed Grants webpage. 

From left to right: Profs. H.-S. Philip Wong, Boris Murmann, and Amin Arbabian

Six New SystemX Seed Grants Awarded

Congratulations to those who have been selected! 

SystemX Alliance allocates a portion of member company contributions for Seed Grants. These grants promote research and student engagement that align with the center’s emphasis on System Thinking and Interdisciplinary Cooperation. They seed future research directions.

We are excited to announce this year's recipients of the SystemX Seed Grants (login required to view):

Additionally, last year's Seed projects will be renewed for a 2nd year:

You can find all awards overviews, annual summary reports, and other proposal submissions on the SystemX Seed Grants webpage (login required).

New Photonic & Quantum Technologies Focus Area Co-Lead: Jonathan Fan

Prof. Jonathan Fan

Jonathan Fan

Jonathan Fan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.  He received his PhD in Applied Physics at Harvard University, where he was an NSF graduate fellow, and his BSE in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University.  He is the recipient of the Air Force Young Investigator Award, Sloan Foundation Fellowship in Physics, Packard Foundation Fellowship, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. 

The mission of Prof. Fan’s research program is to advance principles in optical and photonics engineering to realize miniaturized optical systems with new capabilities.  Application areas include additive manufacturing, metrology, imaging, and energy harvesting.  The group’s research focus is in on three fronts. The first is on the development of new electromagnetic materials, and the group has innovated new materials processes for realizing crystalline plasmonic devices and high-performance self-assembled thermal sources. The second is the utilization of novel nanofabrication methods, including unconventional semiconductor processing, soft materials integration, and additive manufacturing, to realize electromagnetic systems with unconventional form factors. The third is to advance and expediate the simulation and design of electromagnetic systems using optimization and machine learning.  To this end, the group has developed GLOnets, which is an algorithm based on generative neural networks that represents the current state-of-the-art in inverse design.

The next generation of communication, quantum, and imaging technologies will be based on photonic systems that control photons in free space and in chips through interactions with hundreds to thousands of integrated components.  High fidelity optical processing will require conceptually new approaches to automated design, heterogeneous integration of emergent and conventional photonic materials, and the co-design of hardware and software systems.  Meaningful breakthroughs will require strong collaborations between researchers across disciplines and between academia and industry, which is particularly critical to scaling new physical device concepts to complex integrated systems.

To learn more about Prof. Jonathan Fan's lab and their research, please visit the Fan Lab website.

You Got the Covid-19 Vaccine Shot, Are You Well Protected Now?

Elaine Ng, PhD and Prof. Shan X. Wang

The year 2020 will forever be a year to be remembered as the world went into lockdown and halted to a standstill due to the COVID-19 pandemic that was spreading globally like wildfire. Now with vaccines being widely available and the gradual reopening of society, people are eagerly looking to resume life, work, and travel. As more and more people get vaccinated, it is important to know and understand whether a person has developed the relevant antibodies against COVID-19. How can we measure and quantify such antibodies? If I got my Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine shot (with a reported efficacy of 95% after two shots) or AstraZeneca jab (with a reported efficacy of 79% after two jabs), how do I find out whether I am in the lucky 95% or 79%, respectively?

Within SystemX’s Bio-Interface Focused Area, Prof. Wang’s group has been conducting research on giant magnetoresistive (GMR) nanosensors and its applications in biosensing. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, his group has developed a COVID-19 neutralizing antibody assay on the GMR nanosensors as a potential solution to providing faster and cheaper quantification of neutralizing antibodies compared to current techniques such as plaque reduction assays and ELISAs, which are done in laboratories so they are not available for use in mass vaccination efficacy monitoring. Neutralizing antibodies against COVID-19 are the relevant antibodies that prevent binding between the SARS-COV-2 spike receptor-binding (S-RBD) protein and the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor on human cells, thereby providing immunity. (Note: To be precise, we must test memory B cells and T cells in addition to neutralizing antibodies in blood to assess our immunity against a virus holistically. In other words, having a high level of neutralizing antibodies in blood is a sufficient rather than necessary condition for a specific immunity.)

Using GMR nanosensors, which are ideal for point of care or at home testing, we have been able to quantify neutralizing antibody levels in clinical samples both pre- and post-vaccination, as well as longitudinally in between vaccination doses. With such a test, we can develop a COVID-19 neutralizing antibody assay on demand and at the point-of-care to fulfill some of the following applications: 1) the quantification and monitoring of neutralizing antibodies in post-treatment and/or vaccination trials, 2) the surveillance of populations during the drug development process to establish early response to various therapeutic candidates, and 3) the assessment efficacy of vaccines against novel strains or mutants.

We are happy to report all the eight volunteers we recruited for this preliminary study (Fig. 1) are well protected with very high levels of neutralizing antibodies after one or two shots of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

We would like to acknowledge other members of Wang Lab and Utz Lab (Dept. of Medicine) for stimulating discussions and timely collaboration on this project, and Dr. Jack Wenstrand (Agilent) for encouragement and helpful suggestions in the early days of the pandemic.

Figure 1. Neutralizing Antibody Assay on GMR Sensors. (a) GMR signal is highly correlated with ELISA signals. ELISA O.D. values greater than 1 (marked by the blue vertical dotted line) is defined as being positive for NAbs. ELISA O.D. values greater than 12 is defined as high titer. The equivalent NAb concentrations are marked by the blue and green horizontal dotted lines in (c) and (d). The Nab concentrations of two cohorts were quantified. The fold change in NAb concentrations from both cohorts are plotted in (b). NAb concentrations from cohort 1 (N = 15) were quantified at baseline and 48 days post-vaccination and plotted in (c). Longitudinal data traces NAb concentrations of cohort 2 (N = 8) from baseline to about 24 days after their first shot through about 48 days after their first shot (24 days after their second shot) and is plotted in (d).

(Unpublished results, for SystemX Alliance only.)

Prof. H.-S. Philip Wong presents plenary talk at CICC

"Semiconductor Technology – the Path Forward for the Coming Decades"

Philip Wong

Abstract: The semiconductor industry has been extremely successful in integrating discrete components into billion-transistor chips. Future electronic systems will continue to rely on, and increasingly benefit from, the advances in semiconductor technology as they have had for more than five decades. Applications such as AI, machine learning, 5G, and even quantum computing, will not fulfill their promises without the continual advancements of semiconductor technology that is anticipated. 

21st century applications are going to be data-centric. Data analytics, machine learning, and AI applications are going to dominate, from data center to mobile and IoT, from collecting and processing, to curating the data to derive information. Many systems will need to learn and adapt on the fly. 

The emergence of abundant-data computing made the system throughput and system throughput/Watt the key performance metrics. These metrics can be improved by more and more specialization from CPU to GPU, to TPU and accelerators that are able to execute a narrow set of tasks in a massively parallel fashion. In other words flexibility has been traded off to maximize system throughput and energy efficiency. Computation throughput has been advancing faster than the memory bandwidth, resulting in a bandwidth deficit that limits system performance. 

With this in mind, this presentation will look at how the performance of those specialized architectures can be improved at the system level by advances of the underlying device and process technologies. An analysis of the technology trend for GPU and accelerators leads to a key observation: in the coming decades, we must go beyond a single chip from a wafer and focus on integrating chips into systems.

For more information, please visit the 2021 IEEE CICC webpage. 

IEEE Workshop 2021

Solid-State Circuits Directions Workshop: Democratizing IC Design

Solid-State Circuits Directions (SSCD), the new technical committee within the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society, hosted a workshop about the new movement toward an open-source ecosystem for integrated circuit design. The workshop provided an overview of a shuttle program launched by a partnership with Google, SkyWater, and efabless based on SkyWater's SKY130 open-source process (130 nm CMOS),

It showcased design work by community members and provided a call to action for volunteers to design, teach, and mentor. The full agenda and abstract can be found on the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society page. 

SystemX Faculty Awards

Stanford faculty elected to the National Academy of Engineering

Professor Anne Kiremidjian, the C. L. Peck Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is known for her research into the design and implementation of the first wireless sensors and a sensor network for diagnosing the health of buildings and other structures, and for developing advanced damage diagnosis algorithms, as well as advanced probabilistic seismic hazard, risk and resilience models. 

Professor Kunle Olukotun, the Cadence Design Systems Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was recognized for pioneering research in multicore processor design while leading the Stanford Hydra chip multiprocessor project. His role in advancing multicore processors to commercial realization and broad industry adoption was also cited.You can view the entire article from Stanford Today. 

Stanford’s 2021 NIAC fellows are working to bring sci-fi concepts to real space exploration

"As 2021 NIAC fellows, Sigrid Close and Marco Pavone – both associate professors of aeronautics and astronautics – are being given the chance to prove the feasibility of their inventive concepts, known as SCATTER and ReachBot. Close and Pavone are among 14 other NIAC Phase I recipients who are receiving $125,000 to fund nine-month studies on their research ideas. Though their ideas might seem out of this world, should they succeed, they’d drastically impact space exploration."

You can view the entire article from Stanford News. 

Kiyah Agtarap

Kiyah Agtarap
SystemX Newsletter Editor