Associate Professor

Contact Information

• Office Address: Min H. Kao Building, Room 316
• Phone: 865-974-0494
• E-mail: [email protected]
• Department Website

Biography

Ahmedullah Aziz is an Associate Professor and Forrest Eisenhart Family Faculty Awardee in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT). His research looks beyond conventional silicon. His group designs devices, circuits, and systems built on emerging materials, including superconductors, ferroelectrics, phase-transition oxides, and topological systems. The aim is to make computing faster, more energy-efficient, and able to work where ordinary electronics cannot, from the ultra-cold environments of quantum computers to smart image sensors that compute inside the pixel.

Aziz received his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University in 2019. His dissertation on device–circuit co-design with phase-transition materials won both the ACM SIGDA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award and the EDAA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award, two of the most prestigious recognitions in electronic design automation. He also holds an MS from Penn State and a BS from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. Before joining academia, he worked in industry at GlobalFoundries and Samsung R&D.

Since joining UT, he has built a research program recognized internationally for its work in cryogenic and superconducting electronics. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, which supports his work to reimagine superconducting logic systems with emerging devices. He was also named to MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 (Asia Pacific) for his work in cryogenic computing. His group has published more than 50 journal articles and 60 conference papers, in venues such as Nature Electronics, Nature Communications, Applied Physics Reviews, and Applied Physics Letters. This work has drawn over 3,450 citations. He co-authored the Springer book Superconducting Memory Technologies and holds multiple patents and patent applications. His research has been supported by more than $7 million in funding from NSF, the Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. In recognition of this work, the Tickle College of Engineering gave him its Professional Promise in Research and Translational Research Awards, and ACM selected him as a Distinguished Speaker.

He is equally committed to the classroom. He has received the UT Alumni Outstanding Teacher Award, the ASEE Southeastern Section Outstanding Mid-Career Teaching Award, the Gonzalez Family Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the TCE Teaching Fellow Award. His mentoring extends beyond the lecture hall: his first two PhD graduates went directly into tenure-track faculty positions at Clemson University and the University of Kansas.

Aziz serves as an Associate Editor of Scientific Reports and Frontiers in Neuroscience, and sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Applied Physics. He reviews for premier journals including Nature, Science, and Advanced Materials. He is a Track Chair for the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) and has served on the technical program committees of the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS).

Research Interests

• VLSI and Nanoelectronics

• Emerging Memory Technologies

• Extreme-Environment Electronics: Cryogenic, High-Temperature, and Radiation-Tolerant Systems

• Superconducting and Quantum Hardware

• Neuromorphic and Brain-Inspired Hardware

• AI Hardware for Next-Generation Computing

• Compact Modeling

• Device–Circuit Co-Design

Education

• PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 2019
• MS in Electrical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University (University Park), 2016
• BS in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET), 2013