The award recognizes exceptional contributions made through Intel university-sponsored research that aligns with Intel’s mission of creating world-changing technology to improve daily life.

He was recognized for his project “Simulation of Probabilistic Learning Ecosystems (SIMPLE),” with Ian Young and his team at Intel's Components Research Labs.

While most modern computer hardware is primarily based upon determinist zeros and ones, there are some phenomena that create uncertainty that is beyond the capabilities of this binary system.

Yu’s team used conventional and emerging technologies and novel hardware-software co-design for pathfinding of a prototype small-scale accelerator chip. This super energy-efficient probabilistic hardware will be able to quantify this uncertainty and compute with more robustness.

The team now looks to further research and prototype the design into silicon.

Through this industry-academia collaboration, multiple students from Yu’s Laboratory for Emerging Devices and Circuits have interned at Intel and been hired by the company for full-time positions.

He is the first Georgia Tech faculty to receive the honor since Saibal Mukhopadhyay in 2019. More recently, ECE assistant professor Cong (Callie) Hao won an Intel Rising Star Faculty Award in 2023.

Yu’s work has been recognized with a number of recent awards, including the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Inaugural Young Faculty Award in 2019 and the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award 2020. He was named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow in 2023.