Cadence Academic Network Blogs

The Cadence Academic Network hosted an Academic Speaker Series event, in collaboration with the Shanghai Site Technical Talk series, in Cadence Shanghai Office. The talk attracted more than 150 Cadence employees! I organized for Prof. Pingqiang Zhou from ShanghaiTech University to speak about “Enabling the Design of Energy-Efficient and Reliable Processor Chips.”  

Prof. Zhou spoke about how power had been a primary challenge in the design of current and future processor chips. Reducing supply voltage VDD is a popular way to meet power budgets, which could be achieved by either decreasing nominal supply voltage VDD aggressively with technology scaling, or by applying runtime power saving techniques such as dynamic voltage scaling (DVS). In the talk, he presented two related topics: 1) energy-efficient processor chip design using DVS technique, enabled by integrated voltage regulators and 2) reliable chip power supply with the aid of emergency detection system. In particular, he showed a few examples of how machine learning techniques could be used to build such an emergency detection system. 

In addition to an engaging talk, Prof. Zhou has also played a valuable in referring candidates to Cadence. Four of his graduate students have joined Cadence, 2 as interns and 2 as regular hires. Building relationships with professors like Pingqiang Zhou means Cadence is able to learn from the innovative work that academia is doing and recruit their top students. We look forward to collaborating more with such kind of key professors in academia! 

To learn more about the cool work being done by academia, join one of our dedicated LinkedIn pages and check back often to explore the open opportunities at Cadence. 

Speaker Bio: 

Professor Pingqiang Zhou is a tenured associate professor with the School of Information Science and Technology at ShanghaiTech University. Previously, he was with the University of California, Berkeley as a visiting scholar in 2015.  Prof. Zhou’s research interests include EDA, machine learning/deep learning for IC design, AI chip, computer architecture and VLSI design automation and hardware security. He has published more than 40 internationally peer-reviewed journal and conference papers on these topics. He has been serving on the technical program committees/as session chairs of top conferences such as DAC, ICCAD and ASP-DAC, and is also the invited reviewer for many top journals and conferences in the areas of VLSI design automation, computer architecture and VLSI design. Professor Pingqiang Zhou received a M.E. degree from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota.