Muhannad Bakir has been named as a recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA). The objective of the DARPA YFA program is to identify and engage rising research stars in junior faculty positions at U.S. academic institutions and expose them to Department of Defense needs, as well as DARPA's program development process. An associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech since 2009, Dr. Bakir was among 51 awardees chosen from a pool of 560 applicants.

The title of his project that will be funded by this award is "Radical Silicon Interconnection Platform for Ultimate Performance Electronics." The goal of the research is to design and experimentally demonstrate a novel system-level interconnect platform to enable ultimate performance computing systems. The research will explore radical 3D interconnect components and monolithic thermal management technologies for the integration of logic, memory, and silicon nanophotonics. The proposed research will yield a radical new paradigm for how computing systems are designed and interconnected leading to increased system throughput while consuming lower energy and volume.