ECE welcomes two new faculty in the computer engineering, VLSI, and circuits area

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering recently welcomed two new faculty, Zhenman Fang and Saeed Zeinolabedinzadeh, to the areas of computer engineering, VLSI, and circuits. Fang joins us from Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia, Canada, and Zeinolabedinzadeh from Arizona State University.  

Fang earned his doctoral degree in computer science from Fudan University, China. During the final year of his doctoral work, Fang worked with Professor Pen-Chung Yew of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota as a visiting student. After his graduation, he joined the University of California, Los Angeles as a postdoctoral associate. He then went on to work with AMD Vitis (which was Xilinx at the time) as a software engineer. After a two year stint there, he joined the faculty at SFU.

Fang’s research interests are centered on customizable computing with software-defined hardware acceleration to support the ever-increasing performance and energy-efficiency demands of important application domains in the post-Moore's law era. Spanning the entire computing stack, it includes emerging application characterization and acceleration (such as machine learning, big data analytics, high-performance computing, and precision medicine), novel accelerator-centric and near-data computing architecture designs, and corresponding programming abstraction and tool support.

Fang’s expertise is widely recognized. He is the recipient of the ICCAD 10 Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award (2025), three best paper awards (FPL 2024 Stamatis Vassiliadis Best Paper, TCAD 2019 Donald O. Pederson Best Paper, and MEMSYS 2017 Best Paper), four best paper nominees (ICCAD 2025, FCCM 2025, HPCA 2017 and ISPASS 2018), and had a highlighted paper in the FPGA 2021 Special Issue in ACM TRETS. He is also the recipient of prominent funding awards including a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Alliance Award (2020) and a Canada Foundation for Innovation John R. Evans Leaders Fund (CFI JELF) Award (2019).

Fang’s work in software-defined hardware acceleration with the full-stack approach will further strengthen our research in the computer engineering, VLSI, and circuits area, and extend multidisciplinary collaborations with colleagues both within and outside the department.

Zeinolabedinzadeh joins ECE from Arizona State University (ASU). He earned his doctoral degree from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) on chip-scale high-speed circuit design at millimeter-wave (mmW) and terahertz (THz) frequencies for extreme environments such as space electronics. He went on to conduct research as a postdoctoral research associate at Georgia Tech on electronic-photonic integrated circuit design, a new and developing area of technology. 

Zeinolabedinzadeh’s research interests include high speed integrated circuit design such as low SWaP-C transceiver front-ends for wireless and wireline applications such as 5G/6G, radar, positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), distributed coherent radio systems, and imaging. He has over 15 years of experience in the design and development of chip-scale radio frequency front-end components and full transceiver circuits for communication, sensing, ranging and imaging applications. At ASU, he founded and led the mmW, THz, and Photonics (MTP) Lab with prototyping and measurement capabilities ranging from MHz to 500+ GHz frequencies. Circuits developed at the lab include full transceiver front-end at 5G mmW bands (28 GHz) for cellular applications, radiation hardened W-band (94 GHz) transceiver, Electronic-Photonic high power transmitter (DC-50 GHz), fully integrated D-band (120 GHz) transceiver with antenna on-chip, 220-230 GHz sideband separating spectrometer (developed in collaboration with NASA), transceiver circuits above 300 GHz, and THz imagers at frequencies above 400 GHz.

He is a recipient of several prestigious awards including the DARPA Young Faculty, and Office of Navy Research (ONR) Young Investigator awards.

Zeinolabedinzadeh’s expertise in developing high speed microelectronic hardware for wireless and wireline systems will significantly strengthen ECE’s existing strengths in wireless systems, sensing, bioelectronic devices as well as devices built on new magnetic materials. His contributions will enhance the department's capabilities in prototyping advanced chip-scale circuits and systems on mainstream silicon technologies as well as new materials for a variety of new applications including nextG communications, wideband data transfer for AI, bio applications, automotive radar, positioning and navigation systems and microwave imaging.