Kia Bazargan

Kia Bazargan is an Associate Professor and the Leroy and Ruth Fingerson Co-op Professor at the University of Minnesota, College of Science and Engineering. He currently serves as Director of the Co-op Program and focuses on VLSI-CAD, FPGA physical design, and hybrid binary-unary computing.

• University: University of Minnesota
• School: College of Science and Engineering
• Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering

His research emphasizes stochastic computing and unary computing, where numbers are encoded as streams of bits. He explores techniques to reduce hardware costs while maintaining efficiency, particularly for edge computing and neural network applications.

Recent publications highlight his work on hybrid binary-unary computing, FPGA-based inference acceleration, and lossless compression of lookup tables. Grants from Cisco Systems and the National Science Foundation support his projects.

• Scientific Awards:
  • PFI-TT Grant (2020-2024): Commercializing hybrid computing for modern applications
  • Uniqomp NSF Grant (2020-2021)
  • EAGER Grant (2015): Studying complex dynamical systems

His lab (4-162 EE/CSci) investigates scalable computing paradigms to bridge the gap between ASICs and FPGAs in performance and energy efficiency.