Engineering’s Qiangfei Xia Appointed to Dev and Linda Gupta Professorship

Qiangfei Xia

Qiangfei Xia, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering, has been appointed to the Dev and Linda Gupta Professorship for a five-year term. Established in 2000, the professorship supports Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty members who are pursuing new areas of inquiry.<_o3a_p>

A UMass Amherst ECE faculty member since 2010, Xia leads the Nanodevices and Integrated Systems Laboratory and is an internationally renowned researcher in the field of emerging computing hardware, specifically memristor devices and their application in machine intelligence. <_o3a_p>

A memristor is a component that controls the flow of electrical current in a circuit, while also "remembering" the prior state. Memristors differ from transistors - currently the main component of computer chips - which lose all information once the current is interrupted. Xia was the first to integrate crossbar arrays of memristors with foundry-made CMOS chips, opening opportunities for AI hardware systems beyond that envisioned by Moore's Law. <_o3a_p>

Recently, his group designed a highly reliable multilevel memristor that meets nearly all the required properties for analog in-memory computing, built the world's smallest memristive devices, integrated the largest analog memristive crossbar arrays at the time of publication, and demonstrated large-scale hardware acceleration of vector-matrix multiplications for machine learning. <_o3a_p>

Furthermore, Xia has been transferring this technology into the commercial world by co-founding an AI accelerator startup in Silicon Valley. He debuted the first nanoscale memristive radiofrequency switch with superior performance and a few novel hardware security primitives that integrate memory, computing and hardware security functionalities in one circuit.<_o3a_p>

Xia is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has been recognized as one of the world's "Highly Cited Researchers" by Clarivate Analytics for the past two years and is a 2023 recipient of the College of Engineering Outstanding Senior Faculty Award.<_o3a_p>

Prior to joining the ECE faculty at UMass Amherst, Xia worked as a research associate in the Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. He received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2007.<_o3a_p>

The Gupta professorship is named after adjunct professor of engineering Dev Gupta, who earned his doctoral degree in 1977 from the ECE department and received the Alumni Association Distinguished Alumni Award in 2010. Named a "Tech Pioneer" in 2001-02 by the World Economic Forum, Gupta has over 30 patents in communications, networking, circuit design, and signal processing. He is also the founder, chairman, and CEO of NewLANS, a broadband and wireless technologies company. He and his late wife Linda established the professorship in 2000.

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