PhD positions on Seamless design of Smart Edge Processors

The Electronic Systems (ES) group within the Department of Electrical Engineering of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) is seeking to hire four outstanding PhD candidates within the Horizon Europe project CONVOLVE (convolve.eu).

Irène Curie Fellowship

No

Department(s)

Electrical Engineering

Reference number

V36.6105

Project

With the rise of deep learning (DL), our world braces for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in every edge device, creating an urgent need for Edge-AI processing hardware. Unlike existing solutions, this hardware needs to support high throughput, reliable, and secure AI processing at ultra-low power (ULP), combined with a very short time to market.

With its strong legacy in edge solutions and open processing platforms, the EU is ideally positioned to become the leader in this edge-AI market. However, certain roadblocks keep the EU from assuming this leadership role: Edge processors need to become 100x more energy efficient; Their complexity demands automated design with 10x design-time reduction; They must be secure and reliable to get accepted; Finally, they should be flexible and powerful to support the rapidly evolving DL domain.

CONVOLVE addresses these roadblocks in Edge-AI. To that end, it will take a holistic approach with innovations at all levels of the design stack, including:

The CONVOLVE consortium includes some of Europe's strongest research groups and industries, covering the whole design stack and value chain. In a community effort, we will demonstrate Edge-AI computing in real-life vision and audio domains. By combining these innovative ULP and fast design solutions, CONVOLVE will, for the first time, enable reliable, smart, and energy-efficient edge-AI devices at a rapid time-to-market and low cost, and as such, opens the road for EU leadership in edge-processing.

Candidates

We are seeking highly skilled and motivated candidates to tackle any of the following four research areas:

PhD1: Ultra-low power CGRA for Dynamic ANNs and SNNs: Research and develop near-memory computing engines based on Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRA) using a flexible memory fabric for Dynamic Neural Networks. These designs need to be equipped with self-healing mechanisms to (partly) recover in the event of failures, enhancing system-level reliability. The accelerators may also have knobs to exploit near-threshold and approximate computing for extreme energy-efficient operation.

PhD2: Design-flow for SNNs and ANNs implemented in compiler: Research and develop a high-quality compiler backend for CGRAs targets supporting SNNs and ANNs. Compared to existing solutions, the energy efficiency needs to be improved by exploiting SIMD, memory hierarchy, reuse, sparsity, etc.

PhD3: Compositional performance analysis and architecture Design Space Exploration (DSE): Research and develop an infrastructure to model energy & latency at the SoC level, including the SoC level memory hierarchy and processing host, as well as integrating the different accelerator component models. To support rapid evaluations needed for the DSE, analytical models need to be pursued. The development of compositional models will moreover enable run-time performance assessment of an application when the platform configuration changes due to a failing platform component.

PhD4: Composable and Secure SoC accelerator platform: Research and develop novel composable and real-time design techniques to realize an ultra-low-power and real-time Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for an SoC platform consisting of RISC-V cores with several accelerators. Different security features that protect against physical attacks need to be integrated into the SoC platform, while maintaining ultra-low-power and real-time requirements of the applications. The platform should allow easy integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography accelerators and Compute-In-Memory (CIM) based hardware accelerators.

For all these positions we are looking for excellent, teamwork-oriented, and research-driven candidates with an Electrical Engineering or related background and strong hardware/software design skills. Applications from computer science and AI MSc students with affinity for hardware implementation are also welcomed.

Electronic Systems group

The Electronic Systems group (tue.nl/es) is a top research group consisting of five full professors, two associate professors, seven assistant professors, several postdocs, about 40 PDEng and PhD candidates, and support staff. The ES group is world-renowned for its design automation and embedded systems research. It is our ambition to provide a scientific basis for design trajectories of electronic systems, ranging from digital circuits to cyber-physical systems. The trajectories are constructive and lead to high-quality, cost-effective systems with predictable properties (functionality, timing, reliability, power dissipation, and cost). Design trajectories for applications that have strict real-time requirements and stringent power constraints are an explicit focus point of the group.

• A meaningful job in a dynamic and ambitious university with the possibility to present your work at international conferences.
• A full-time employment for four years, with an intermediate evaluation (go/no-go) after nine months.
• To develop your teaching skills, you will spend 10% of your employment on teaching tasks.
• To support you during your PhD and to prepare you for the rest of your career, you will make a Training and Supervision plan and you will have free access to a personal development program for PhD students (PROOF program ).
• A gross monthly salary and benefits (such as a pension scheme, pregnancy and maternity leave, partially paid parental leave) in accordance with the Collective Labor Agreement for Dutch Universities.
• Additionally, an annual holiday allowance of 8% of the yearly salary, plus a year-end allowance of 8.3% of the annual salary.
• Should you come from abroad and comply with certain conditions, you can make use of the so-called ‘30% facility’, which permits you not to pay tax on 30% of your salary.
• A broad package of fringe benefits, including an excellent technical infrastructure, moving expenses, and savings schemes.
• Family-friendly initiatives  are in place, such as an international spouse program, and excellent on-campus children day care and sports facilities.

More information
Do you recognize yourself in this profile and would you like to know more? Please contact
dr.ir. Sander Stuijk, s.stuijk[at]tue.nl, http://www.es.ele.tue.nl/~sander .

For information about terms of employment, click here  or contact Mrs. Linda van den Boomen,
HR advisor l.j.c.v.d.boomen[at]tue.nl.

Please visit www.tue.nl/jobs  to find out more about working at TU/e!

Application
If you are interested in working in an exciting, dynamic, high-tech environment, where you will contribute to creating the society of the future, we invite you to submit a complete application by using the 'apply now' button on this page.

The application should include:

• cover letter in which you describe your personal motivation and qualifications specifically for the position. Indicate your choice of research topics listed above.
• curriculum vitae.
• transcript of master and bachelor degrees.
• copies of your final MSc thesis, including English abstracts, and (if applicable) published papers (PDF files). Submit at least one document written in English of which you are the main author.
• results of your IELTS or TOEFL test (or equivalent).
• and the contact information of two academic referees.

We look forward to your application and will screen your application as soon as possible. The vacancy will remain open until the position is filled.

We do not respond to applications that are sent to us in a different way.

Please keep in mind you can upload only 5 documents up to 2 MB each. If necessary please combine files.