The Digital Circuits and Systems Group is a research group in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) at ETH Zürich led by Prof. Luca Benini.
The focus of the group is energy efficient design of digital circuits and systems, from smart wearable devices with a power budget of less than a mW, all the way to High Performance Computing (HPC) and cloud AI systems that consume power in the MWs. The explosion in complexity of workloads such as foundation models of generative AI, coupled with limitations in available energy for mobile devices, maximum power density in tightly integrated circuits, and the significant costs associated with running and cooling data centers, all require hardware and software solutions to achieve more computations with the available energy than ever before.
The group covers all aspects of digital system design, from technological aspects, circuit and architecture design, demonstrators for various applications, all the way to how these new systems can be programmed. Open hardware and software are emphasized, with a specific focus on RISC-V: the group has developed and maintains PULP, a world-leading open-source computing platform (www.pulp-platform.org). Application fields include digital twins, AI-based assistants, extended reality, environmental and structural monitoring, wearables, autonomous vehicles, telecommunication infrastructure, and high-performance computing.
In this context, the Digital Circuits and Systems Group invites applications for one PhD position focusing on the deployment and optimization of foundation models for multimodal AI on secure RISC-V servers and hardware accelerators, toward the goal of co-designing future open RISC-V based AI-factories.
Foundation models have emerged as a transformative approach in AI, enabling a wide range of applications, from natural language processing to computer vision and beyond. However, to effectively exploit their capabilities, platform specific optimizations and a secure, multi-tenant computing environment is required.
In this context, the research group is exploring the development of foundation models and large-scale transformers across different scales: high-range platforms (commercial RISC-V machines, capable of handling models in the order of 10B parameters), mid-range platforms (featuring thousands of computing engines, suited for models in the order of 1B parameters), low-range platforms (operating in the ultra-low-power domain and fitting models in the order of 10M parameters).
The successful implementation of such models is necessarily tied to a deep understanding of the system architecture, both from the hardware and the software point of view across the whole stack (e.g., compilers, low-level programming, …).
Successful candidates should have
The PhD student will work with RISC-V computing systems, commercial products as well as research prototypes. Experience with computer security and/or RISC-V hardware and software is desirable but not strictly required.
At the Digital Circuits and Systems Group, we value knowledge exchange and collaborative working environment as a highly interdisciplinary and international research team. We provide a wide variety of training opportunities at the cutting edge of digital circuits and systems research.
We look forward to receiving your online application with the following documents:
Please note that we exclusively accept applications submitted through our online application portal. Applications via email or postal services will not be considered.
Further information about The Digital Circuits and Systems Group can be found on our website. For further information about the position, please contact Dr. Andrea Cossettini (cossettini.andrea@iis.ee.ethz.ch) and Dr. Yawei Li (yawei.li@vision.ee.ethz.ch).
ETH Zürich is well known for its excellent education, ground-breaking fundamental research and for implementing its results directly into practice.
Besuchen Sie die Arbeitgeberseite