ECE CHIPS In: Minuscule Hardware, Maximum Impact

This is our third and final article in the “ECE CHIPs In” series, highlighting BU ECE’s contributions to research and education under the umbrella of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, and our faculty’s collective investment in the national effort to build a robust and innovative semiconductor industry.

by A.J. Kleber

In a few short years, Professor Rabia Yazicigil has made a name for herself in microelectronics research as a collaborative, flexible innovator motivated to cross disciplinary lines in pursuit of cutting-edge technical advances with broad applications to the betterment of society. In many ways, she is the very image of the kind of scientist and engineer called for by the CHIPS Act: productive, inventive, application-focused, collaborative- and service-minded, and an active mentor cultivating similar values and capabilities in a younger generation of innovators.

Professor Yazicigil specializes in low-power, custom micro-scale integrated circuit design, purpose-built for a growing variety of applications from communications to synthetic biology. She has been instrumental in bringing the revolutionary, code-agnostic decoder algorithm GRAND–often termed “the universal decoder”–to hardware realization, working closely with local and overseas collaborators to develop a series of custom chips utilizing and improving GRAND’s method of “intelligent noise guessing” to streamline, speed up, and secure future wireless communications.

Photo shows a tiny device made of layered microchips, with a penny for scale.
A device prototype.

Expanding the focus on efficient wireless communications beyond the looming concern of capacity crunch, Professor Yazicigil has been particularly noted for her increasing body of collaborative work in interdisciplinary, biomedical-centric projects. Her miniscule, resource-light designs are ideal for medical applications, as exemplified by her ongoing collaboration with researchers from MIT on the development of a tiny ingestible capsule or “smart pill” for monitoring the human gastrointestinal tract in real time. Their prototypical device, which uses her customized, energy-efficient sensor readout circuit, could have a positive impact on the lives of millions of patients suffering from gut ailments around the world.

Professor Yazicigil’s evident facility with forming productive, interdisciplinary collaborative relationships is not limited to colleagues at other institutions, of course. She has partnered several times with members of BU’s Biomedical Engineering department and with fellow BU ECE Professor Douglas Densmore on projects such as an ambitious effort to advance biomanufacturing, enabling the conversion of food waste and manure into useful products which are currently derived from fossil fuels. Adapting her highly miniaturized, low-power sensor technology for integrated use in bioreactors is a key component of the BioMADE consortium’s approach. The duo have also recently been awarded a $315K grant from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) to develop hybrid microfluidic-CMOS biosensors specifically to monitor wastewater for harmful byproducts of the semiconductor industry itself.

The community-oriented approach Professor Yazicigil brings to her work encompasses her students as well as her peers. Since she joined BU ECE in 2018, student researchers in her WISE-Circuits Lab have taken an active and vital role in her projects, often first-authoring key journal and conference articles and performing initial demonstrations of key advances. Some of her Ph.D. advisees have won awards as a result, such as Arslan Riaz’s Best Demo Award and Best Research Demo Award at COMSNETS 2023 and 2022, respectively, for custom GRAND algorithm chip demonstrations, and Qijun (Mandy) Liu’s 2023 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award. Liu, who is poised to become the lab’s first graduate after defending her dissertation in December, has recently been selected for an IEEE ISSCC 2023 Student Research Preview Best Poster Award, to be presented at ISSCC 2024 in February.

Professor Yazicigil behind a podium, holding up a tiny item between the thumb and forefinger of each hand.
Holding up prototypes during a presentation at the 2023 ECE faculty retreat.

With all this vital research already in progress, Processor Yazicigil shows no signs of slowing down, serving as Boston University’s institutional lead in the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub’s 5G/6G project under the co-leadership of longtime collaborator and GRAND algorithm co-creator Professor Muriel Médard of MIT and other top-tier researchers. The NEMC is one of eight Microelectronics Commons Regional Innovation Hubs established by the DoD with a $238M CHIPS Act award, its largest to date, and with $2B in anticipated funding over the next four fiscal years. Professor Yazicigil’s group is interested in continuing to push the boundaries with the GRAND family of algorithms, as realized in innovative chip designs that can improve on all key metrics. Professor Yazicigil has also received a recent $270K award from the SRC and the Texas Analog Center of Excellence (TxACE) to work on physical-layer security measures for wireless communications.

In addition to her outstanding research and mentorship, Professor Rabia Yazicigil has a stellar track record when it comes to serving her scholarly community; an IEEE Senior Member, she was elected to the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society AdCom as a 2024 Member-at-Large, in addition to serving as its representative on the IEEE Council on RFID (CRFID) since 2022. She is the recipient of the 2021 BU ECE Outstanding Faculty Service Award, and has recently contributed to the “Hardware-Limited Task-Based Quantization in Systems” chapter in Women in Telecommunications, part of Springer Nature’s Women in Engineering and Science book series, in addition to invited talks and event organization at conferences such as ISSCC 2023.