Dr. Zick is the Research Director of Transformational Computing at USC ISI, leading efforts to solve problems of national importance through game-changing computer architectures, hardware and systems. He brings extensive experience with advanced government-funded research and from commercial industry including IBM, Motorola, and two startups. He studied under pioneer John H. Holland (genetic algorithms, complex adaptive systems) and was awarded a NASA Fellowship covering his Ph.D. work in Physically Adaptive Computing. His patented inventions include microarchitectures that enabled commercial products (6x86MX microprocessor), a digital superconducting flux memory, and a novel asynchronous Ising machine. His Transformational Computing group is now leading the way toward unconventional, bio-inspired, and AI-enabled compute systems that enable dominant capabilities.

Dr. Zick's current R&D directions center around novel computer architectures, hardware and processing solutions for critical government problems. Interests include:

• Unconventional computing
• Bio-inspired compute systems
• Game-changing optimizing solver systems and Ising machines
• Human-AI co-design of breakthrough hardware architectures
• Physics-inspired compute systems
• Superconducting digital processing
• Analog-digital hybrid computing
• Neuromorphic computing
• Architectural innovation exploiting emerging platforms

Group capabilities include:

• Rapid prototyping in USC ISI's MOSIS 2.0 and the California DREAMS hub in the DoD Microelectronics Commons
• Advanced digital ASIC design and prototype demonstrations
  • Hardware accelerators for dramatically improved efficiency, agility or security
  • High-speed I/O including advanced SerDes PHYs
  • Experience with advanced fabrication nodes in multiple foundries
• Advanced FPGA-based solutions
  • Advanced use of AMD-Xilinx Versal devices
  • Specialized FPGA tools
  • FPGA-based ASIC emulation
  • Hardware lab with wide variety of FPGA boards
• Digital superconductor architectures and systems
• Novel approaches to solving optimization problems
  • Novel methodology called hardware-centric algorithm discovery. First used to discover the hardware-friendly algorithm below.
  • Novel heuristic algorithm called Cosm for sparse Ising optimization, with demonstrated best results on the largest Gset Ising/Max-Cut benchmark problems:
    

    Performance report of heuristic algorithm that cracked the largest Gset Ising problems (G81 cut=14060), arXiv:2505.18508 [cs.DS], 2025.

  • Highly efficient fully connected CMOS-based Ising/QUBO solvers

Recent Graduate Student Members

• Akash B.
• Aditi C.
• Om A.
• Arpitha N.
• Dhyanik P.
• Jiahui W.
• Dorothy Q.

Congratulations to Transformational Computing intern Aditi on the USC ECE Outstanding Academic Achievement Award!