Qiangfei Xia | Electrical and Computer Engineering | UMass Amherst
Biography
Dr. Qiangfei Xia the Dev and Linda Gupta professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UMass Amherst and head of the Nanodevices and Integrated Systems Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2007 from Princeton University. Afterward, he spent three years as a research associate at Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, where he pioneered the development of the first CMOS/memristor hybrid chip with reconfigurable logic functions. In October 2010, Dr. Xia joined the UMass Amherst faculty as an assistant professor, with his tenure clock starting in January 2011. He was promoted to an associate professor with tenure in January 2016 and became a full professor in September 2018.
Dr. Xia's research is centered around emerging AI hardware (electronic materials, semiconductor devices, enabling technologies, and integrated systems), with applications spanning machine intelligence, neuromorphic computing, reconfigurable RF systems, hardware security, and more. Recently, he and his team developed a reliable multilevel resistance-switching device that satisfies most of the necessary device properties for analog in-memory computing in artificial neural networks. They also created the world's smallest memristive devices in a crossbar circuit, featuring a 2 nm feature size and 6 nm half-pitch, and constructed an eight-layer 3D crossbar array, which was featured on the cover of Nature Electronics. Additionally, Dr. Xia's team designed a process flow and integrated the largest analog memristive crossbar arrays at the time of publication, with the chip image appearing as the inaugural cover of Nature Electronics. This chip has showcased a wide range of applications in analog signal processing, machine learning, and hardware security, etc. They also introduced the first nanoscale memristive RF switch, a robust true random number generator and a versatile crossbar array that integrates memory, computing, and hardware security functionalities.
Dr. Xia's work has earned him a DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), an NSF CAREER Award, the Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, the College of Engineering Outstanding Senior Faculty Award, and the Chancellor’s Medal, which is the highest honor bestowed upon faculty at UMass Amherst. He is consistently recognized as a "Highly Cited Researcher" by Clarivate and was named an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to resistive memory arrays and devices for in-memory computing."
Dr. Xia is the lead principal investigator for a large-scale lab-to-fab project funded by the Microelectronics Commons program under the U.S. CHIPS Act. The effort aims to transfer analog memristor technology from research laboratories to mainstream semiconductor manufacturers for edge intelligence applications. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded TetraMem Inc., a Silicon Valley-based startup specializing in AI accelerators.
Dr. Xia teaches a wide range of courses, from freshman to graduate levels, including Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering (ENGIN 112), Fundamentals of Semiconductor Devices (ECE 344), Microelectronic Fabrication (ECE 571), Neuromorphic Engineering (ECE 576/676), and Nanostructure Engineering (ECE 597/697NS). He has created or co-developed most of these courses. His dedication to teaching has earned him a nomination for the Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA), a prestigious campus-wide honor recognizing exemplary teaching at UMass Amherst.
Dr. Xia has served as a technical committee member for the IEEE International Electronic Devices Meeting (IEDM), IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), International Conference on Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication (EIPBN, steering committee 2019-25; conference chair 2023), to name a few. He organized the in-memory computing tutorial session at the 2019 IEEE International Memory Workshop (IMW) and served as a guest editor or on the editorial board for several journals. He is also an active panelist for the U.S. and international funding agencies and foundations and a peer reviewer for a few dozen international archival journals and conferences. Dr. Xia serves as a topical co-lead in the AI Hardware area for the Northeast Microelectronic Coalition (NEMC), one of the eight regional innovation hubs in the U.S. under the Microelectronics Commons. On campus, his most significant service contribution is the construction of a cutting-edge cleanroom facility in Marcus Hall.