Funding

We are incredibly thankful for the valuable support provided by our sponsors, without whom our research efforts would simply not be possible. In particular, we thank each of the following sponsors (listed in chronological order by most recent award) for their support:

Specific projects are listed here, to emphasize the specific support that each sponsor has provided to our research group:

  1. Spring 2025: Our NSF CAREER proposal was selected for funding! This is for our project: "CAREER: CO2-Efficient Computing: Quantifying Trade-Offs in Power, Performance, Area, and Total Carbon Footprint of Monolithic Three-Dimensional Integrated Circuits". This award provides valuable support for our efforts in developing future generations of energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable computing systems.
  2. Fall 2024: Our NIH R21 proposal was selected for funding! Our collaborative effort: “Auto-Sensing, Instantaneous Adaptive Ranging OCT” is being led by Benjamin Vakoc at Mass General Hospital (leading application development of Optical Coherent Tomography), together with Marko Lončar’s group at Harvard (leading the design of integrated photonic circuits for wavelength-programmable laser cavities in Thin Film Lithium Niobate) and our Nano-Design Research Group (leading the design of electro-optical driver circuits in Silicon CMOS). Both Georgios Kyriazidis and John Davis from our team work on this project.
  3. Fall 2024: Our NSF EAGER proposal was selected for funding! This is for our project: “EAGER: Active Metamaterials for Computing Applications,” which is a collaboration with Federico Capasso, David Brooks, Gu-Yeon Wei, and Kiyoul Yang. From our team, Bolu Adesanmi, Danielle Grey-Stewart, and John Davis work on this project.
  4. Spring 2024: Our NSF Expeditions in Computing proposal was selected for funding! We are extremely excited to work with an all-star team of researchers from Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, and Yale University. Check out our website: https://carbonconnect.eco/ for more information about our exciting project: “Collaborative Research: National Science Foundation Expeditions in Computing: Carbon Connect -- An Ecosystem for Sustainable Computing”. Our Nano-Design Research Group is leading our team’s effort in Technology Foundations, focusing on reducing the embodied carbon footprint of manufacturing future computing systems. Many PhD students in our group contribute to this project and to carbon-aware computing in general, including Mariam Elgamal, Danielle Grey-Stewart, David Kong, Jalil Morris, and Bolu Adesanmi.
  5. Spring 2024: Our NSF CIRC proposal was selected for funding! This is a collaborative effort led by Tufts University (Professors Mark Hempstead and Marco Donato), together with Professor Lillian Pentecost at Amherst, and Professor Gu-Yeon Wei at Harvard. Our project: “Collaborative Research: CIRC: New: MemSysExplorer: Community Tools and Interfaces for Exploring and Evaluating Next-Generation Memory Systems,” aims to develop MemSysExplorer, a design space exploration and evaluation infrastructure to empower researchers to study innovative memory approaches across many applications scenarios. David Kong and Danielle-Grey Stewart both contribute to this project.
  6. Fall 2023: Our Seed Funding proposal to the Harvard Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship was selected for funding! Our project: “Ultra-Fast Optical Static Random Access Memory (Optical SRAM) Operating at the Speed of Light,” aims to develop high-speed all-optical SRAM with optical read port, optical write port, and optical storage, with no electrical modulation required. We are immensely grateful to the Harvard Dean’s Competitive Fund for providing essential seed funding for this forward-looking project! Both John Davis and Georgios Kyriazidis from our group contribute to this effort.
  7. Fall 2023: Our Seed Funding proposal to Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability was selected for funding! Our project: “Quantifying the Embodied Carbon Footprint of Future Computing Systems” has been a major catalyst for multiple tangible successful outcomes. In particular, the Seed Funding from Salata directly supported our DATE 2025 Best Paper Award nomination: “Quantifying Trade-Offs in Power, Performance, Area, and Total Carbon Footprint of Future Three-Dimensional Integrated Computing Systems,” led by Danielle Grey-Stewart and David Kong. It also directly supported our HPCA 2025 paper: “CORDOBA: Carbon-Efficient Optimization Framework for Computing Systems,” led by Mariam Elgamal from our group.
  8. Spring 2023: We received a sub-contract from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to contribute to their Department of Energy (DoE) project: "Two Truths: Multi-Project Wafer (MPW)"! Our team is helping to validate an open source design methodology to automatically generate tape-out ready digital circuit layouts from high-level programming languages. David Kong is leading our effort on this project, and led a tape-out in one of SkyWater's 130 nm node processes.
  9. Fall 2022: Our Seed Funding proposal to the Harvard Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship was selected for funding! Our project: “Exploring the Benefits of Surface-Acoustic-Wave Devices for Very-Large-Scale Computing Systems,” aims to develop a new class of energy-efficient non-linear circuits that manipulate the phase and amplitude of periodic signals to implement digital logic circuits. This Seed Funding has been critical in our groups’ development of Phasor Optical Logic (POL), which leverages non-linear optical processes to implement general purpose digital logic circuits in the optical domain. POL was derived from analogous (non-linear) digital circuits in the acoustic domain, which we were able to realize given support from the Harvard DCF. Georgios Kyriazidis led our efforts in this project.
  10. Fall 2021: Our Extension Funding proposal through the Applications Driving Architectures (ADA) Center was selected for funding! Our project: “ADA Center: Three-Dimensional (3D)-Integrated Computing + Sensing Architectures: Design Space Exploration for Optimizing Application-Specific Performance” is a collaboration with Professor Sarita Adve from UIUC, together with our group and Professor David Brooks at Harvard. From our group, Georgios Kyriazidis led the charge on this effort, in designing and analyzing custom 3D ICs optimized for augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) workloads, exemplified by ILLIXR:https://illixr.github.io/.