Shimeng Yu has received the 2025 Rama Divakaruni Technical Excellence Award from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). He received the award on Monday, Sept. 8 at TECHCON 2025, a premier semiconductor industry conference.

The award from SRC, a high technology-based consortium, recognizes research of exceptional value to its member companies, celebrating innovative contributions that significantly advance the productivity and competitiveness of the semiconductor sector. Yu, a Dean’s Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the award for his work in pioneering system-technology co-optimization (STCO) and developing the open-source NeuroSim simulator.

“It has been quite a journey—from receiving the inaugural Young Faculty Award in 2019 to now being honored with the Technical Excellence Award from SRC,” Yu said. “This achievement would not have been possible without the relentless efforts of my students and researchers, as well as the close collaborations with industry liaisons from SRC member companies.”

The Technical Excellence Award, established in 1991, was renamed to honor Rama Divakaruni, recognizing its namesake’s outstanding contributions and long-time support of mentoring within the SRC community.

That recognition now extends to Yu, whose work models emerging memory technologies and advances efficient AI hardware design, bridging theory and practical implementation in collaboration with leading semiconductor companies. These innovations are helping shape next-generation computing.

The award is the latest of many career achievements, notably being named an IEEE Fellow in 2024, receiving the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award in 2023, and the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award in 2020.

Yu has been a member of the ECE faculty since 2018. He also serves as a theme leader of two SRC/DARPA JUMP 2.0 projects on intelligent memory/storage and heterogeneous/monolithic 3D integration.