Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. recently announced the winning teams of the 2023 edition of Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship – India. It is a prestigious national level competitive research fellowship program that fosters innovation and forward thinking among university PhD candidates.

SemiX is pleased to share that Sivakumar Elangovan and Porus Vangala , PhD students from Electrical Engineering Department, IIT Bombay, won the followship under the Advanced Semiconductor Electronics domain. Their faculty advisors are Prof. Maryam Shojaei Baghini and Prof. Udayan Ganguly. 

The topic of their proposal is “A Novel PVT Variation Tolerant Temporary Memory for In-Memory Compute Applications”, which also forms a part of Sivakumar’s PhD thesis work. The basic idea behind the proposal is to mitigate transistor level PVT variations in a memory array thereby enabling analog computing for AI/ML applications like accelerators. The proposal essentially consists of two circuit solutions:

1. A novel memory (in standard CMOS bulk technology) whose unit cell currents across the entire memory array are uniform against PVT variations. 

2. A standard memory cell (8T) compatible peripheral circuit that imparts PVT variation tolerance to analog in-memory computations in the standard cell array. 

https://www.qualcomm.com/research/university-relations/innovation-fellowship/2023-india