Overview

The overarching research goal of eLab is to design, model, and optimize energy-efficient computing systems that connect emerging applications with advanced hardware platforms. Our research spans computer architecture, embedded systems, design automation, machine learning systems, wearable sensing, and human-centered computing. Across these areas, we develop cross-layer methodologies that jointly consider applications, algorithms, architectures, interconnects, power delivery, thermal constraints, and runtime management.

A major focus of our current research is heterogeneous and chiplet-based computing. As computing systems move beyond monolithic chips toward 2.5D/3D integration, chiplets, domain-specific accelerators, and network-on-interposer architectures, new challenges arise in communication, power delivery, thermal behavior, workload mapping, and design-space exploration. eLab develops modeling, simulation, and optimization frameworks to guide the design of scalable, efficient, and reliable heterogeneous architectures.

Our work also advances energy-efficient AI and embedded computing systems, including domain-specific SoCs, AI accelerators, processing-in-memory architectures, runtime scheduling, power and thermal modeling, and communication-centric architecture design. We are particularly interested in efficient acceleration of large language models, hybrid Transformer–state-space models, mixture-of-experts models, and edge AI workloads.

In parallel, eLab continues its long-standing work in wearable, flexible, and human-centered systems. The OpenHealth project provides an open-source hardware/software platform for wearable health monitoring and embedded sensing research. Our Flexible Hybrid Electronics project develops methodologies and tools for Systems-on-Polymer: fully integrated flexible electronic systems capable of sensing, computing, and communication. Our Human-Machine Communication project studies wearable and embedded interfaces that help users convey their intent to smart objects, assistive devices, and internet-of-things systems.

Together, these directions support eLab’s broader mission: advancing energy-efficient, intelligent, and human-centered computing systems through cross-layer design, open-source tools, reproducible research artifacts, and education.

Research Funding

We thank the following agencies and companies for their generous support of our research.

The application domains we target, and cross-cutting theory and design technologies employed at eLab are summarized below.

Smart phone ICs	Server and data centers for cloud computing	Personal e-health ICs
Low-power, heterogeneous embedded systems	Many integrated core architectures for HPC	Flexible electronics
Energy Efficient VLSI Design	High Performance VLSI Design	SoC/Circuit Solutions for Innovative Systems

Please contact uogras@wisc.edu for latest information.