Dhandeep Challagundla

Riadul Islam, Dhandeep Challagundla

Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)-driven electronic design and automation (EDA) tools, high-performance computing, and parallelized algorithms are essential for next-generation microprocessor innovation, ensuring continued progress in computing, AI, and semiconductor technology. Machine learning-based design rule checking (DRC) and lithography hotspot detection can improve first-pass silicon success. However, conventional ML and neural network (NN)-based models use supervised learning and require a large balanced dataset (in terms of positive and negative classes) and training time. This research addresses those key challenges by proposing the first-ever unsupervised DRC violation prediction methodology. The proposed model can be built using any unbalanced dataset using only one class and set a threshold for it, then fitting any new data querying if they are within the boundary of the model for classification. This research verified the proposed model by implementing different computational cores using CMOS 28 nm technology and Synopsys Design Compiler and IC Compiler II tools. Then, layouts were divided into virtual grids to collect about 60k data for analysis and verification. The proposed method has 99.95% prediction test accuracy, while the existing support vector machine (SVM) and neural network (NN) models have 85.44\% and 98.74\% accuracy, respectively. In addition, the proposed methodology has about 26.3x and up to 6003x lower training times compared to SVM and NN-models, respectively.

Riadul Islam, Joey Mulé, Dhandeep Challagundla et al.

High-speed vision sensing is essential for real-time perception in applications such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and industrial automation. Traditional frame-based vision systems suffer from motion blur, high latency, and redundant data processing, limiting their performance in dynamic environments. Event cameras, which capture asynchronous brightness changes at the pixel level, offer a promising alternative but pose challenges in object detection due to sparse and noisy event streams. To address this, we propose an event autoencoder architecture that efficiently compresses and reconstructs event data while preserving critical spatial and temporal features. The proposed model employs convolutional encoding and incorporates adaptive threshold selection and a lightweight classifier to enhance recognition accuracy while reducing computational complexity. Experimental results on the existing Smart Event Face Dataset (SEFD) demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable accuracy to the YOLO-v4 model while utilizing up to $35.5\times$ fewer parameters. Implementations on embedded platforms, including Raspberry Pi 4B and NVIDIA Jetson Nano, show high frame rates ranging from 8 FPS up to 44.8 FPS. The proposed classifier exhibits up to 87.84x better FPS than the state-of-the-art and significantly improves event-based vision performance, making it ideal for low-power, high-speed applications in real-time edge computing.

Joey Mulé, Dhandeep Challagundla, Rachit Saini et al.

Event-based vision revolutionizes traditional image sensing by capturing asynchronous intensity variations rather than static frames, enabling ultrafast temporal resolution, sparse data encoding, and enhanced motion perception. While this paradigm offers significant advantages, conventional event-based datasets impose a fixed thresholding constraint to determine pixel activations, severely limiting adaptability to real-world environmental fluctuations. Lower thresholds retain finer details but introduce pervasive noise, whereas higher thresholds suppress extraneous activations at the expense of crucial object information. To mitigate these constraints, we introduce the Event-Based Crossing Dataset (EBCD), a comprehensive dataset tailored for pedestrian and vehicle detection in dynamic outdoor environments, incorporating a multi-thresholding framework to refine event representations. By capturing event-based images at ten distinct threshold levels (4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 75), this dataset facilitates an extensive assessment of object detection performance under varying conditions of sparsity and noise suppression. We benchmark state-of-the-art detection architectures-including YOLOv4, YOLOv7, EfficientDet-b0, MobileNet-v1, and Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG)-to experiment upon the nuanced impact of threshold selection on detection performance. By offering a systematic approach to threshold variation, we foresee that EBCD fosters a more adaptive evaluation of event-based object detection, aligning diverse neuromorphic vision with real-world scene dynamics. We present the dataset as publicly available to propel further advancements in low-latency, high-fidelity neuromorphic imaging: https://ieee-dataport.org/documents/event-based-crossing-dataset-ebcd