The Integrated Systems Laboratory (Laboratoire des Systèmes Intégrés – LSI) studies design technologies for circuits and systems. The objective is to research the interplay of hardware and software design for traditional (computation on silicon) and non-traditional (nanotechnology and quantum) systems. Topics of research include, but are not limited, to the following areas.
Design technologies for nanosystems, addressed the creation of integrated systems that leverage emerging nanotechnologies. This area includes the modeling of hardware with dedicated languages, the compilation of hardware models into circuits, the relation between hardware and software design and its concurrent design (co-design), the system-level optimization from multiple objectives (e.g., performance, energy consumption, yield). The novel thrust in this area comes form the exploration of the use of new circuits technologies (e.g., superconducting circuits and nano technologies) within system design, presenting unprecedented advantages and challenges.
LSI News
November 2023
Our warmest congratulations to Andrea Costamagna, who has been nominated for a Dean’s award in recognition for his contribution to the teaching mission. Andrea has performed very well as Teaching Assistant in Physics.
November 2023
Our paper “Striving for Both Quality and Speed: Logic Synthesis for Practical Garbled Circuits” has won the IEEE/ACM William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award (Front-end) at the 2023 International Conference on Computer-aided Design (ICCAD), held in San Francisco, California, USA. The paper is authored by PhD candidate Mingfei Yu and Prof. Giovanni De Micheli.
This work explores the possibility of improving the practicality of the garbled circuit protocol, a promising secure computation technique, from the perspective of dedicating tailored logic synthesis algorithms.
October 2023
On October 18, 2023, Rassul Bairamkulov, Alessandro Tempia Calvino and Prof. Giovanni De Micheli won the Best Paper Award at the 31st IFIP/IEEE Conference on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI-SoC 2023) for their work “Synthesis of SFQ Circuits with Compound Gates”. Their work describes the novel methodology for synthesizing the superconductive logic networks in SFQ technology achieving smaller area as compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.
October 2023
Giulia Meuli, PhD graduate at the Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI), has received the IBM Doctorate Award in Electrical Engineering, for her thesis “Program Compilation for Large-Scale Quantum Computers”. The recognition is to reward a remarkable PhD thesis work in the field of quantum computing and quantum compilation. Her thesis combines electronic design automation (EDA) algorithms and quantum computing techniques to achieve an open-source platform applicable to quantum computer design.
February 2023
Giovanni De Micheli received the Phil Kaufman Award (link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Kaufman_Award) , co-sponsored by the ESD Alliance and IEEE/CEDA, that honors individuals who have had a demonstrable impact on the field of electronic system design through technology innovations, education/mentoring, or business or industry leadership. Giovanni De Micheli joins a selected group of pioneers and leaders in design automation receiving the most prestigious award in this field.
July 2022
Siang-Yun Lee received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2022 International Workshop on Logic and Synthesis (IWLS) for the paper “An Automated Testing and Debugging Toolkit for Gate-Level Logic Synthesis Applications“. The paper surveyed testing and debugging techniques suitable for logic synthesis algorithms and developed an open-sourced toolkit.
June 2022
Washinghton DC, June 3rd, 2022 Giovanni De Micheli has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the advancement of Science (AAAS) https://www.aaas.org/ The AAAS seeks to “advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people.” AAAS Fellows are a distinguished cadre of scientists, engineers and innovators who have been recognized for their achievements across disciplines, from research, teaching, and technology, to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public.
December 2021
Giovanni De Micheli has been awarded the 2021 Technical Achievement Award by the IEEETechnical committee on Cyber-Physical Systems ‘‘For sustained contributions to smart sensors, wearable and implanted electronics, and cyber-medical systems.’’This award recognizes the sustained effort in designing complete systems, from sensors to software, for medical and environment application. De Micheli was the leader of the Swiss Nano-Tera.ch program from 2009 to 2018 that fostered activities in this direction.
Giovanni De Micheli and Luca Benini (ETHZ) have received the 2020 Richard Newton Technical Impact award at the 58th Design Automation Conference in San Francisco. The award recognizes a paper which has made an outstanding technical contribution in the scope of electronic design automation (EDA) at least ten years before the award is presented. De Micheli and Benini wrote the seminal paper “Networks on Chips: A New SoC Paradigm” on IEEE Computer in January 2002. This paper received 4976 citations to date, making it one of the most known works in EDA.
November 2021
Giulia Meuli, PhD graduate at the Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI), received the EDEE best Doctoral Thesis Award in Electrical Engineering, for her thesis “Program Compilation for Large-Scale Quantum Computers”. The recognition is to reward a remarkable PhD thesis work in the field of electrical engineering and quantum computing.
As quantum computers become available resources, an important problem is to automate the translation of quantum algorithms into quantum circuits, which play a role similar to assembly code in traditional computers. Quantum compilation, has been the subject of Giulia Meuli’s thesis, where she also combines compilation with optimization. She implemented her thesis work as part of an open-source project called Caterpillar, which is freely available to researchers and developers. The algorithms and the software presented in her thesis contribute to a widespread effort of the research community to build a complete and efficient software stack to program and control the first practical universal quantum computers.
February 2021
Grenoble, February 4th, 2021. In recognition of the importance of university research to the advancement of design, automation and test, and to encourage young researchers to work in the field, the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA) has established an award for outstanding Ph.D. dissertations. Dr Eleonora Testa (Advisors : Prof. Giovanni De Micheli and Dr Mathias Soeken) is among the 2020 winners for her remarkable work in her thesis : “Data Structures and Algorithms for Logic Synthesis in Advanced Technologies”. Dr Testa graduated from EPFL in 2020, and she is currently an R&D Engineer, Senior 1 at Synopsys Inc.
December 2020
Giovanni De Micheli wins the ACM/SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award for 2019, for pioneering and fundamental contributions to synthesis and optimization of integrated circuits and networks-on-chip. The award will be presented in 2021. De Micheli joins a prestigious group of previous winners. https://www.sigda.org/awards/pioneer/
October 2019
Congratulations to PhD student, Francesca Criscuolo, who just won (as 2nd classified) the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Sensors Conference 2019, held in Montréal, Canada. Her paper titled “Flexible sweat sensors for non-invasive optimization of lithium dose in psychiatric disorders” was rewarded at the IEEE Sensors Conference 2019.
October 2019
Prix de la Ville de Lausanne Award 2019 went to Francesca Stradolini for her exceptionally good PhD Thesis : IoT Bio-Electronic Multi-Panel Device for On-line Monitoring of Anaesthesia Delivery
EPFL thesis n°8800 (2018)
Thesis directors: Dr S. Carrara, Prof. G. De Micheli
“For opening of new frontiers and pioneering contributions in the field of online monitoring of anaesthesia by proposing innovative solutions for multi-panel bioelectronic devices with internet connectivity.”
March 2019
Our paper “Reversible Pebbling Game for Quantum Memory Management” has been acknowledged with the Best IP Award 2019 at the DATE conference in Florence. The paper is authored by Giulia Meuli, Mathias Soeken and Giovanni De Micheli from our lab in collaboration with Martin Roetteler and Nikolaj Bjorner from Microsoft.
More details …
February 2019
The Open Logic Synthesis Libraries and Benchmarks are a collection of modular open source C++ libraries and benchmarks developed at LSI to keep up the driving force in improving optimization algorithms in the field of logic synthesis.
The project has been selected to be one of EPFL’s open science champions by the open science strategic committee in the framework of the Open Science Fund. Contact person is Heinz Riener, who is a post-doc in our lab.
August 2018
Aya Ibrahim, Ph.D. student in our lab, William Simon and Damien Doy, both former MSc. students, won the 2018 Xilinx Open Hardware University Design Competition 2018 – Ph.D. Category for their design entitled “First Single FPGA, 5 Watt, and Inexpensive 1024-channel Medical 2D and 3D Ultrasound Imager”.
June 2018
Luca Amaru (Synopsys), Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardon (Univesrity of Utah) and Giovanni De Micheli receive the IEEE/CEDA Don Pederson Award for the best paper on the IEEE Transactions on CAD entitled “Majority-Inverter Graph: A New Paradigm for Logic Optimization.”
October 2017
Giovanni De Micheli elected as International Honorary member of the American Academia of Arts and Sciences. The American Academy serves America as a champion of scholarship, civil dialogue, and useful knowledge. As one of the country’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, the Academy convenes leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to respond to the challenges facing the nation and the world.
https://www.amacad.org/default.aspx