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Terahertz lies at the juncture between RF and optical electromagnetism, serving as a transition from mm-Wave to infrared photonics. Terahertz technology has been used for industrial quality control, security imaging, and high-speed communications, and often generated through optoelectronic solutions by using photoconductive antennas. In this paper, Multiphysics simulations on semi insulating GaAs, grapheneenhanced photoconductive antennas are conducted to effectively decouple optical responses of semiconductor carrier generation/drift from Terahertz radiation computation, which provides a comprehensive and integrated platform for future terahertz photoconductive antenna designs, Comment: 3 pages, 4 figures, accepted by 2024 IEEE MTT-S International Conference on Numerical Electromagnetic and Multiphysics Modeling and Optimization (NEMO'2024)

The emergence of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) brings new opportunities to boost the performance of sorting acceleration on FPGAs, which was conventionally bounded by the available off-chip memory bandwidth. However, it is nontrivial for designers to fully utilize this immense bandwidth. First, the existing sorter designs cannot be directly scaled at the increasing rate of available off-chip bandwidth, as the required on-chip resource usage grows at a much faster rate and would bound the sorting performance in turn. Second, designers need an in-depth understanding of HBM characteristics to effectively utilize the HBM bandwidth. To tackle these challenges, we present TopSort, a novel two-phase sorting solution optimized for HBM-based FPGAs. In the first phase, 16 merge trees work in parallel to fully utilize 32 HBM channels. In the second phase, TopSort reuses the logic from phase one to form a wider merge tree to merge the partially sorted results from phase one. TopSort also adopts HBM-specific optimizations to reduce resource overhead and improve bandwidth utilization. TopSort can sort up to 4 GB data using all 32 HBM channels, with an overall sorting performance of 15.6 GB/s. TopSort is 6.7x and 2.2x faster than state-of-the-art CPU and FPGA sorters.

An analog neural network computing engine based on CMOS-compatible charge-trap transistor (CTT) is proposed in this paper. CTT devices are used as analog multipliers. Compared to digital multipliers, CTT-based analog multiplier shows significant area and power reduction. The proposed computing engine is composed of a scalable CTT multiplier array and energy efficient analog-digital interfaces. Through implementing the sequential analog fabric (SAF), the engine mixed-signal interfaces are simplified and hardware overhead remains constant regardless of the size of the array. A proof-of-concept 784 by 784 CTT computing engine is implemented using TSMC 28nm CMOS technology and occupied 0.68mm2. The simulated performance achieves 76.8 TOPS (8-bit) with 500 MHz clock frequency and consumes 14.8 mW. As an example, we utilize this computing engine to address a classic pattern recognition problem -- classifying handwritten digits on MNIST database and obtained a performance comparable to state-of-the-art fully connected neural networks using 8-bit fixed-point resolution., Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) are widely used in modern artificial intelligence (AI) and smart vision systems but also limited by computation latency, throughput, and energy efficiency on a resource-limited scenario, such as mobile devices, internet of things (IoT), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and so on. A hardware streaming architecture is proposed to accelerate convolution and pooling computations for state-of-the-art deep CNNs. It is optimized for energy efficiency by maximizing local data reuse to reduce off-chip DRAM data access. In addition, image and feature decomposition techniques are introduced to optimize memory access pattern for an arbitrary size of image and number of features within limited on-chip SRAM capacity. A prototype accelerator was implemented in TSMC 65 nm CMOS technology with 2.3 mm x 0.8 mm core area, which achieves 144 GOPS peak throughput and 0.8 TOPS/W peak energy efficiency., Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures

Convolutional neural network (CNN) offers significant accuracy in image detection. To implement image detection using CNN in the internet of things (IoT) devices, a streaming hardware accelerator is proposed. The proposed accelerator optimizes the energy efficiency by avoiding unnecessary data movement. With unique filter decomposition technique, the accelerator can support arbitrary convolution window size. In addition, max pooling function can be computed in parallel with convolution by using separate pooling unit, thus achieving throughput improvement. A prototype accelerator was implemented in TSMC 65nm technology with a core size of 5mm2. The accelerator can support major CNNs and achieve 152GOPS peak throughput and 434GOPS/W energy efficiency at 350mW, making it a promising hardware accelerator for intelligent IoT devices.

A fully integrated CMOS THz transmitter for short range data-links is presented which provides 0.47 mW of output power to 294 GHz. The output frequency is derived from a 147 GHz on-chip LO and fully differential caterpillar power amplifier combined with a transformer coupled frequency doubler. The transmitter is integrated with an on-chip dipole antenna for use in THz communication systems and consumes a total of 258 mW.