IEEE SSCS Distinguished Lecture at University of Waterloo: Rethinking Chip Design in the Age of AI

The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society K-W Section and the University of Waterloo are hosting Prof. Mehdi Saligane for a distinguished lecture titled "Rethinking Chip Design in the Age of AI" on April 30, 2026.

The lecture explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping chip design from two complementary directions: leveraging AI to enhance the design process itself, and crafting specialized hardware tailored for AI workloads.

Highlights

• Agentic-RL gLayout — a reinforcement-learning system for analog layout generation that automates tasks traditionally requiring manual expert effort.
• Hardware-software co-design for edge AI — a stack designed to minimize latency and power consumption for efficient on-device inference.
• Discussion of open infrastructure (OpenROAD, OpenFASOC) and how community-driven flows accelerate chip development.

Thanks Prof. John Long for hosting.

About the Speaker

Prof. Mehdi Saligane is an Assistant Professor at Brown University's ECE Department and a co-founder of the OpenROAD and OpenFASOC projects. He is a recipient of the 2023 Google Cloud Research Innovators Award and chairs the IEEE SSCS Open-Source Ecosystem Technical Committee. He also organizes the SSCS Chipathon Design Contest and the Code-a-Chip Notebook Competition.