ECE team wins at inaugural AI Hardware Design League
Winning team AI or Die accept a $5,000 check from Nvidia.
Engineering students from five different nations converged at the University of Arizona to participate in the first-ever Artificial Intelligence Hardware Design League (AI-HDL) competition on campus. The inaugural competition wrapped up with the best overall design winner, the U of A team AI or Die, walking away with $5,000 and lasting industry connections.
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering organized the competition, which included the Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing, Institute for Computation & Data-Enabled Insight, and Nvidia as sponsors.
Soheil Salehi, founder of AI-HDL and assistant professor of ECE, said workforce development is key given that Arizona is attracting chip manufacturers such as Intel and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
“The goal is to bring in students who think entry into this area has a high barrier and show them it doesn’t,” said Salehi.
AI or Die leader Sean Rice attributed the win to strong teamwork and AI tools such as generative pre-trained transformers, or GPTs. These large language models are used in widely accessible AI tools such as ChatGPT.
“It provides an extremely rich source of information really quickly,” the ECE junior told KGUN9 News. “You ask the AI ‘why might this not be working,’ and it’ll provide a suggestion.”
The help paid off for Rice and fellow ECE juniors Jerald Ocaya, Jacob Grudinschi and Sam Lovas. Not only did AI or Die win best overall design among the 11 teams that finished the competition, but also the team placed first in the undergraduate student category.
Teams ranged from three to five members and were evaluated on design security, energy usage, and area efficiency, and ranked within two academic levels: community college and undergraduate students, and graduate students.
Rice, who is researching quantum optics with ECE associate professor Boulat Bash, said the competition has opened doors to unexpected career paths.
“AI is super interesting, and semiconductor manufacturing is also surprisingly fascinating,” he said. “I'm kind of at a fork in the road, and doing well in this competition is piquing my interest in exploring this domain further.”