Bio: Ishan Thakkar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY. He is the Director of the Unconventional Computing Architectures and Technologies (UCAT) Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Colorado State University (CSU), Fort Collins, CO. During his Ph.D. studies at CSU, he was a member of the Embedded Systems and High-Performance Computing (EPiC) Laboratory. His research broadly focuses on designing and optimizing unconventional (more than Moore) architectures and technologies for energy-efficient, reliable, and secure computing, for a wide range of platforms including embedded systems, internet-of-things (IoT), and high-performance computing systems.
Honors: Dr. Thakkar is the recipient of the Best Paper Award from ACM GLSVLSI 2021, a Best Paper Award Nomination from IEEE ISVLSI 2021, the Best Paper Award Honorary Selection from ACM GLSVLSI 2020, the Best Paper Award from IEEE/ACM SLIP 2016 workshop, a Best Paper Nomination from the IEEE ISQED 2016 conference, and a Best Paper Finalist Selection from the IEEE TMSCS journal in 2015, for his research contributions. He also received the Outstanding Reviewer Award from the CODES+ISSS Conference at IEEE/ACM ESWEEK 2022.
Service: Dr. Thakkar is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE TCVLSI Newsletter. He is also a Guest Editor for the Special Issue, Memory Technologies for HPC/AI Workloads: Device-Level Innovations to System-Level Optimizations (VSI: HPC/AI) in the Elsevier Memories - Materials, Devices, Circuits and Systems Journal. He serves in the ACM SIGDA Executive Team as the Social Media Chair. He has served as an Organizing Committee Member of IEEE/ACM conferences and workshops such as the IEEE International Green and Sustainable Computing (IGSC) conference, IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip (NOCS), IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Network on Chip Architectures (NOCARC), and the Workshop on Computing with Unconventional Technologies (CUT). He is also on the Technical Program Committee of several international conferences such as the IEEE/ACM DAC, IEEE/ACM CODES+ISSS conference, IEEE/ACM NOCS, IEEE/ACM NOCARC, ACM GLSVLSI, IEEE ISQED, IEEE RTAS, IEEE IGSC conference, IEEE EVLSID conference, and IEEE MCSoC conference. He has been a reviewer for many journals, including IEEE TC, IEEE TVLSI, IEEE TCAD, IEEE TMSCS, ACM TECS, ACM JETC, ACM TODAES, and Elsevier JPDC.
Open Positions
I have multiple undergraduate and Ph.D. positions available in my lab. In particular, I am looking for students to work on projects related to silicon-photonic neuromorphic accelerators, in-memory computing architectures for machine learning, stochastic computing, and silicon-photonic devices and circuits for beyond terascale communication and information processing. More information can be found here.