Arijit Raychowdhury has been selected for the 2020 Qualcomm Faculty Award (QFA) for his contributions to low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) design, including his group’s work on power-management and clocking circuits that have impacted Qualcomm’s internal research and development. 

The QFA supports key professors and their research, with the goal of strengthening Qualcomm’s engagement with faculty who also play a key role in Qualcomm’s recruiting of top graduate students.

Fine-grain power-management plays a critical role in improving the energy-efficiency of low-power SoCs and requires a close-loop control between system software and embedded hardware. Over the last five-plus years, Raychowdhury’s group has pioneered novel control topologies for improving the integration and performance of embedded voltage regulators, and his students have obtained multiple Best Paper Awards and scholarships based on their work. 

Their research has also led to multiple papers in premier venues — such as the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the VLSI Symposium, and the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits – as well joint technology development with several semiconductor companies, including Qualcomm. In particular, Raychowdhury’s group proposed a new circuit concept – co-regulation of clock and power-supply in a single control loop – that is currently being prototyped and evaluated by Qualcomm’s Processor Research Group.

Raychowdhury is a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he leads the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab. Before joining ECE in 2013, Raychowdhury was a staff scientist at Intel’s Circuit Research Lab. His research interests include digital and mixed-signal designs with applications in microprocessors, SoCs, AI accelerators, and power-management integrated circuits.