CAREER Award Winner

Ye Cao, an assistant professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department, has earned a five-year, $500,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to make computer processing of large amounts of data faster and more efficient with devices called memristors.

Applications such as deep learning require computers that can process large amounts of data. They also necessitate a lot of cycling between computing and processing in different places on the computer. One solution to make this more efficient is in-memory computing, which requires memristors—a type of material device that can be programmed to change its electrical resistance states in response to computing needs.

Dr. Cao will attempt to identify new materials and structures for use in memristors that will allow researchers to switch between resistance (computing) and change (memory) states gradually rather than abruptly.

"I am happy to earn a CAREER award," he says. "The knowledge we gain from this research will help us provide guidance for the experimental study of characterization and measurement of memristor properties for faster, more efficient computing."

"If Dr. Cao is able to identify new materials that will enable memristors to be more functional, with more memory, this could open the door for many new ideas in supercomputing," notes Efstathios Meletis, chair of the Materials Science and Engineering Department. ₪