Awards

Prof. Robert Pilawa-Podgurski has received the 2024 Spark Award from Bakar Fellows Program, with Dr. Yicheng Zhu as his Innovation Fellow. Their awarded research proposal, titled “Powering the AI Revolution: A New Voltage Regulator Enabling Direct 48-V-to-1-V Vertical Power Delivery for Next-Generation Ultra-High-Power Processors,” aims to make use of innovative tools and techniques designed in Prof. Pilawa’s lab to develop a hybrid switched-capacitor voltage regulation module for ultra-high-power processors that can achieve a 2x reduction in power conversion losses and a 4x reduction in physical size compared to state-of-the-art commercial products. This could reduce overall data center power usage by almost ten percent, benefiting both the environment and businesses.

The Bakar Fellows Program has been committed to expanding access to entrepreneurship since its inception in 2012, providing funding, resources, and mentorship to faculty, graduate students, and, most recently, undergraduates. This year marks the beginning of a new partnership with the Academic Innovation Catalyst (AIC), a new deep tech funding platform founded by Matt and Lisa Sonsini. Initially, AIC will join forces with the Bakar Fellows program to allocate grants to Berkeley faculty immersed in deep technology exploration, particularly in climate technology. Grant recipients will receive $300,000 over three years for market research, prototype development and other commercialization activities, in line with the standard Bakar Fellows award amount and duration. AIC envisions expanding this pilot initiative across UC Berkeley and beyond, fostering innovation on a broader scale within the academic community. The inaugural recipients of the AIC grants are Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, a UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences professor, and Zakaria Al Balushi, a UC Berkeley Materials Science and Engineering assistant professor.

Post-doctoral scholar Dr. Yicheng Zhu has received a Ross N. Tucker Memorial Award for 2024.

The Tucker Award is given to recognize superior work and scholarship in the characterization, development and/or use of semiconductor, magnetic, optical or electronic materials by a graduate student or students pursuing such areas of inquiry. This award memorializes Dr. Ross N. Tucker, who contributed significantly to the advancement of the technology of materials used in semiconductor electronics. More details about this award can be found on the EECS Department website. Dr. Zhu’s thank you video can be viewed here. (edited) 

EE researcher Ben Liao, working with Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, has received the Best Presentation Award at the 2024 IEEE Power and Energy Conference at Illinois (PECI) – a student-directed power and energy conference held annually at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The PECI Best Presentation Award is determined both by conference directors and input from attendees.

Ben received the Best Presentation Award for his work on designing and building a high-power, electronically-controlled, modular resistive load bank. The proposed design overcomes testing limitations in commercial solutions when characterizing state-of-the-art converters. The architecture can easily be extended and modified to suit various other applications where an electronically-controlled resistive load is desired. For more information, please consult the full paper, available at this link.

EECS Ph.D. student Yicheng Zhu (advisor: Robert Pilawa-Podgurski) has won an NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship. Zhu, whose research interests include enabling technologies for high-performance electric power conversion, is one of five recipients of the fellowship, which awards up to $50,000 to each recipient in support of research in areas such as accelerated computing, with fellows tackling projects in deep learning, robotics, computer vision, computer graphics, circuits, autonomous vehicles, and programming systems. Awardees are selected from a highly competitive, global applicant pool and will participate in a summer internship with NVIDIA. Spanning 22 years, NVIDIA has awarded $6 million to nearly 200 students to support graduate research. “Our fellowship recipients are among the most talented graduate students in the world,” said NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally. “They’re working on some of the most important problems in computer science, and we’re delighted to support their research.” Zhu’s research will explore extreme-performance hybrid switched-capacitor voltage regulation modules for ultra-high-power GPUs, which enables highly efficient and ultra-compact vertical power delivery with fast transient response.

Submitted by Matthew Santillan on January 25, 2023 – 4:51pm

Yicheng Zhu wins NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship | EECS at UC Berkeley

NVIDIA Awards $50,000 Research Fellowships to PhD Students



EECS graduate students Roderick Bayliss III (advisor: Robert Pilawa-Podgurski) and Vivek Nair (advisor: Dawn Song) have been selected to receive 2022 Hertz Fellowships.  One of the most prestigious awards of its kind, Hertz Fellowships support PhD students whose research show “the greatest potential to tackle society’s most urgent problems.” Bayliss is developing more efficient and power-dense types of power converters—devices that change the current, voltage or frequency of electrical energy—and inductors, which store energy, to help reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. He earned his B.S. and M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from MIT.  Nair is developing cutting-edge cryptographic techniques to defend digital infrastructure against sophisticated cyberthreats. He was the youngest-ever recipient of a B.A. and Master’s in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and is the founder of Multifactor.com.  Their fellowships will fund up to five years of graduate research with “the freedom to pursue innovative ideas wherever they may lead.”  Hertz Fellows also receive lifelong professional support, including mentoring and networking with a powerful community of more than 1,200 researchers.

Submitted by Magdalene L. Crowley on June 6, 2022 – 11:19am

Rod Bayliss and Vivek Nair win 2022 Hertz Fellowships | EECS at UC Berkeley