Prof. Qiangfei Xia

Dr. Qiangfei Xia is a 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, where he was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Engineering (a graduate fellowship from Princeton). He then spent three years as a research associate in the Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. During that time he demonstrated the first CMOS/memristor hybrid chip with reconfigurable logic functions. In October 2010, he joined the faculty of UMass Amherst as an assistant professor (tenure clock started in January 2011). He became an associate professor with tenure in January 2016 and then a full professor in September 2018. Dr. Xia's research interests include beyond-CMOS devices, integrated systems, and enabling technologies, with applications in machine intelligence, reconfigurable RF systems, and hardware security. Recently, with his team, he developed a reliable multilevel resistance-switching device that meets most of the required device properties for in-memory computing in artificial neural networks, the world's smallest memristive devices in a crossbar circuit (2 nm feature size, 6 nm half-pitch), and the tallest 3D crossbar array (8 layers, the cover of Nature Electronics) as a convolutional neural network for video processing. Furthermore, he integrated then largest analog memristive crossbar arrays (the inaugural cover of Nature Electronics) and demonstrated a wide variety of applications in analog computing, machine learning, and hardware security. Finally, he debuted the first nanoscale memristive RF switch with superior performance and a few novel hardware security primitives such as a robust true random number generator and a versatile crossbar array that integrates memory, computing, and hardware security functionalities. He has received a DARPA YFA, NSF CAREER award, among others.