Dr. Zick is the Research Director of Transformational Computing at USC ISI, leading efforts to solve problems of national importance using breakthrough computer hardware. He brings experience developing commercial microprocessors and ASICs (IBM/Cyrix x86, Motorola) and addressing government needs with advanced ASIC- and FPGA-based solutions. He has led key government-funded research programs such as Northrop Grumman's IARPA QEO and DARPA QAFS efforts in superconducting quantum annealing. Dr. Zick studied complex adaptive systems with pioneer John H. Holland and was awarded a NASA Fellowship covering his Ph.D. work in Physically Adaptive Computing. He has been awarded five patents for novel microarchitectures and circuits.

Dr. Zick's current R&D directions are in the areas of novel computer architectures, systems-on-chip and processing solutions for critical government problems. Capabilities and research areas include:

• 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
  • Hardware lab with wide variety of FPGA boards
  • Solutions leveraging AMD-Xilinx Versal devices
• Accelerated combinatorial optimization
  • Novel algorithm for improved sparse Ising optimization, with demonstrated world best results on MaxCut benchmark problems:
    

    arXiv:2311.09275 [cs.LG]

• Emerging topics such as multi-die architectures; analog-digital hybrids; superconducting electronics architectures; harnessing emergent behavior for computation (e.g., with coupled oscillator systems); inspiration from nature.

Dr. Zick welcomes inquiries from potential collaborators.