Purdue team awarded $21M for AI hardware research
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A Purdue University-led team will receive $21 million over four years from the Bloomington-based Applied Research Institute to advance artificial intelligence hardware.
The team, which includes faculty from Purdue, other academics and representatives from the Department of Defense, technology companies and defense contractors, aims to accelerate hardware innovation to improve semiconductor performance, the university said.
Specifically, the team plans to leverage the capabilities of magnetic random-access memory to design efficient computing hardware fabrics.
Nicknamed CHEETA, the project represents “a game-changing leap in microelectronics … to tackle the critical challenges of energy efficiency and latency in AI hardware,” Purdue professor Kaushik Roy said in the news release.
CHEETA was one of four microelectronics projects announced Sept. 18 that received funding from the Applied Research Institute, a not-for-profit technology incubator with more than 200 partners across government, industry and academia. The other winners are teams from the University of Notre Dame, Great Lakes Crystal Technologies in East Lansing, Michigan, and Hill Mission Technologies in McLean, Virginia.
In addition to Roy, the Purdue-led team includes professor Anand Raghunathan and associate professor Sumeet Gupta and representatives from Arizona-based Everspin Technologies, Georgia Institute of Technology, Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division, Argonne National Laboratory, University of Michigan and Northrop Grumman.
“By uniting the strengths of our partnerships with Argonne National labs, NSWC Crane as well as government agencies, leading industry partners and top academic institutions, we are embarking on a groundbreaking project that will push the boundaries of semiconductor innovation,” Karen Plaut, Purdue’s executive vice president for research, said. “The outcomes of this collaboration will not only enhance the performance and resilience of defense technologies but also solidify our leadership in advancing critical technologies that protect our nation and shape the future of defense.”