Chang received this award for his research on “high-performance circuits for continuous and discrete dynamical systems and their applications in learning and optimizations.” He is exploring computing architectures and circuit designs, which can implement complex dynamics and solve computationally hard problems. 

Chang has recently designed, taped-out, and measured a 49-core ASIC processor capable of solving large-scale convex optimizations via projection methods. This is one of the largest test-chips designed in academia, and Chang demonstrated break-through performance and energy-efficiency in this work. 

The test-chip is fully programmable with its own instruction-set architecture and is capable of solving a large class of problems with applications in machine learning and in image and signal processing. More recently, Chang has been exploring analog circuits that can solve/approximate hard problems, such as SAT, through continuous time dynamical systems. His work has received significant recognition in the circuit community.

Chang is a part of the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab (ICSRL) and is advised by ECE Associate Professor Arijit Raychowdhury. This is the second year in a row that a graduate student from ICSRL has won the Chih Foundation Award.