UC San Diego Launches AI-Driven Chip Design Research Initiative Supported By Qualcomm Technologies

As artificial intelligence transforms industries around the world, researchers are increasingly – and recursively – turning to AI to help solve a challenge at the heart of the technology itself: How to design the powerful, energy-efficient computing systems and systems-on-chips (SOCs) needed to support it.

In an effort to address this challenge, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. is building on decades of collaboration with the University of California San Diego by providing a $500,000 gift to its Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing. The gift will advance research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and microelectronics through the launch of the AI in Microelectronic Systems (AIMS) initiative, a new collaboration between Qualcomm Technologies researchers and UC San Diego faculty.

The AIMS initiative will investigate methods to improve the design of SOCs — integrated circuits that combine multiple computing components into a single device — as well as the hyperscalar computing architectures that are increasingly central to everything from mobile devices and autonomous systems to cloud computing and large-scale AI.