The University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) and Qualcomm Technologies announced on November 2, 2026, the AI in Microelectronic Systems (AIMS) initiative, a research program to use artificial intelligence in designing chips and computing systems — with energy efficiency as one of its priorities.
The total investment is $750,000: Qualcomm is contributing a $500,000 gift to the Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing, which is adding $250,000 in matching funds. According to the university, Qualcomm's contribution carries no requirements for research deliverables, services or reporting.
What the research aims to investigate
The core idea is to shift part of the manual work that still dominates chip design: instead of hand-drawing every architecture, AI should explore possible architectures, predict how they will perform and point to the most promising design choices. The focus includes systems-on-chip (SoCs), which combine several computing components in a single integrated circuit.
The initiative brings together researchers from the Halıcıoğlu School and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, combining machine learning, computer architecture, high-performance computing and semiconductor design. Participants include professor Yusu Wang, who has previously led AI-assisted chip design work with Qualcomm researchers, and associate dean Jinendra Ranka, whose team built independent infrastructure for benchmarking AI processors, comparing their performance and energy efficiency with competing technologies. Lily Weng, Mahidhar Tatineni, Martin Kandes, Zhijian Liu and Arya Mazumdar are also taking part.
According to the university, the work is relevant to hardware for mobile devices, autonomous systems, cloud computing and large-scale AI — not a project limited to a single type of processor.
It is important to mark the limit of the announcement: AIMS is, for now, a commitment to investigate new design methods, not the unveiling of a finished chip or a measured efficiency gain. Lower design costs and better energy efficiency are the initiative's goals, not results already delivered.
Image credit: Geisel Library on the UC San Diego campus, photo by Ben Lunsford, via Wikimedia Commons. The photo illustrates the campus and is not an image of the AIMS research.
Sources: Superpower Daily — UC San Diego starts Qualcomm-backed research into AI-assisted chip design (with information from the university announcement, also listed on the UC San Diego Today portal).
Transparency: this article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, based on cross-checking public posts on X and sources on the internet. Consult the original sources to confirm the details before sharing.
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