2021 QIF North America Program Details

We invite teams to submit proposals in the following areas. We also welcome proposals outside of the sub-areas listed below:

Advanced Semiconductor Electronics

• Ultra-low (uW) power embedded platform for edge computing (ULP architectures and designs, HW accelerators, power generation and management, novel memories, security)
• Novel materials and heterogeneous integration (2D semiconductors, GaAs, GaN, etc.)
• CMOS package integration (thermal-aware designs or circuits, advanced packaging techniques, antenna-in-package etc.)
• RF / analog ASICs and architectures (Sub-6GHz 5G power amplifiers, mmWave RFIC and Data Converters for 5G NR, adaptive RF signal processing algorithms, etc.)
• Advanced antenna (mmWave and phase-array antennas), novel antenna materials, structures and implementations
• Power Management ASICs (wide bandwidth SMPS, wide bandwidth envelope tracker, embedded regulation)
• ASIC implementation methodology development for improved Performance, Power, Area, Yield. On-die power grid analysis and optimization, dynamic and static power optimizations, silicon-driven static timing analysis, design optimization for yield improvement
• Low-power high-speed Data Converters
• Low-power high-bandwidth SERDES for die to die and chip to chip communication
• Low-power high-bandwidth memory interface (DRAM and FLASH) circuits
• Ultra-low power ML HW design using mixed-signal techniques (such as Compute-In-Memory and analog neural network)
• Mixed-signal HW design using ML techniques
• Digital wireless transceivers
• Interference/jammer cancellation and concurrent transceivers/coexistence

Advances in Communication Techniques and Theory

• Reliable low latency communications for licensed/unlicensed in mid band and mmW spectrum
• Machine learning designs for wireless communications systems and algorithms
• Joint communication and sensing/positioning techniques for licensed and unlicensed spectrum
• Vehicle-vehicle, vehicle to infrastructure, and vehicle-pedestrian communications design
• Cooperative sensing and communication for radar and other sensors
• Low energy networks (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, 802.15.4, Zigbee, etc.)
• Low-power signal-processing algorithms for mmW massive-MIMO communication systems
• Advanced low power HW/FW/SW modem implementation approaches
• New signal-processing techniques and use-cases using RF sensing (wireless channel capture)
• Iterative detection and decoding algorithms
• Non coherent communication for low power IoT
• Communication systems design in THz bands

• Advanced sensors and sensor fusion
• Imaging radar
• Computer vision for autonomy
• Sensor fusion with deep learning
• Behavior planning with uncertainty

• Natural language processing and voice user interface
• Computer vision and geometric deep learning
• Reinforcement and continual learning
• ML for combinatorial optimization
• Graph neural networks
• On-device training and model personalization
• Intermediate representation for machine learning workloads/compilers
• Transfer learning and Knowledge distillation
• Extreme energy efficient inference hardware accelerators for ML loads and lower complexity algorithms and convolutional nets
• Deep generative modeling and unsupervised learning
• Bayesian deep learning and uncertainty estimation
• Federated learning

• Real Time 3D perception, mapping, reconstruction, and geometry interpretation
• Eye-tracking devices and algorithms
• Hand skeleton and multimodal human body pose estimation and tracking
• Low power/complexity rendering systems
• Lighting/illumination modelling
• Multi-focal, near eye displays
• High efficiency video coding techniques
• Deep learning based image and video compression (intra and inter prediction, in-loop filters, transforms, entropy coding)
• Deep learning based optimized video encoding
• Perceptually optimized video coding
• Image and video quality assessment
• 6DoF video compression, Point Cloud compression
• Few-shot learning in human activity classification
• Dynamic texture and shape synthesis in the wild
• Learning universal networks for multiple tasks in computer vision, e.g. detecting, tracking, segmenting objects and scenes in videos

• Novel processor architectures, microarchitectures, extensions, and accelerators
• Novel processor architectures, microarchitectures, extensions, and accelerators
• Multimedia and gaming architectures (not limited to GPU, GPGPU, VLIW, DSP, etc.)
• Novel architectures for artificial intelligence, edge training, inference and processing in memory
• Security features of CPUs and accelerators at the instruction set, execution, storage (including caches) and SOC levels
• Machine learning CAD for VLSI HW design

• Isolation technologies: Virtualization, enclaves, and software sandboxing
• Key management for IoT: Establishing trust between embedded devices
• Machine learning model security against adversarial attacks
• Protocol security: Analysis and verification of communication protocols such as 3GPP for 5G to discover security issues both in standards and their implementations
• SoC security: Security of heterogeneous systems on chip
• Software-based exploitation of hardware vulnerabilities, such as micro-architectural, side-channels and glitch attacks, and proper countermeasures
• User authentication: Biometric and behavioral authentication of users by mobile and embedded devices
• Vulnerability detection: New tools and techniques for finding exploitable vulnerabilities in Software and/or Hardware, with a focus on embedded systems
• Solutions for data provenance, privacy and security

• 5G test techniques for mmWave and sub6 devices and system
• Defect-oriented testing and fault modeling in deep sub-micron process nodes
• Applications of Data Analytics, Machine Learning and AI in Test
• Test Challenges for 2.5D/3D Systems in Packages

Qualcomm is inviting applications for the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2020 from PhD students in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (and related) departments at:

United States

• California Institute of Technology
• Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
• Columbia University
• Cornell University
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• Princeton University
• Purdue University
• Rutgers University
• Stanford University
• UC Berkeley (UCB)
• UC Los Angeles (UCLA)
• UC San Diego (UCSD)
• UC Santa Barbara (UCSB)
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
• University of Maryland, College Park
• University of Michigan
• University of Southern California (USC)
• University of Texas at Austin
• University of Washington
• University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Canada

• University of Montreal
• University of Toronto

Info Sessions are scheduled in October 2020 – details in the ‘Info Sessions’ section

Submission site opens: November 2020

Application submission deadline: December 1, 2020 (10:00AM PST)

Selection announcement: December 2020

Proposal submission deadline:  January 2021

Finalists’ announcement: March 2021

Finalist presentations submission deadline: March 2021

Finalist presentations: April 2021

Winners’ announcement: May 2021

QIF Winners’ Day: October 2021