C-lab at GW

Weidong Cao

Assistant Professor

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering & Applied Science

The George Washington University

Email: weidong.cao AT gwu.edu; Office: 6615 SEH

I am a tenure-track assistant professor (starting Fall 2023) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The George Washington University. I previously worked as a principal engineer at TSMC, San Jose, CA. Before that, I was a postdoctoral research associate at Washington University in St. Louis, where I also earned my Ph.D. I received my M.S. from the Institute of Microelectronics at Tsinghua University in 2016 and my B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Northwestern Polytechnical University in 2013. My research work has received multiple Best Paper Awards/Nominees from conferences such as DAC, DATE, and ISLPED.

I am leading the C-lab at The George Washington University. C represents Circuit Design, Computer-Aided Design, and Computing Architecture and System Design, which have been the focuses of my research career so far. In C-lab, we currently aim to harness and integrate quantum physics, AI, integrated circuits, computer architecture, and information theory to build efficient, reliable, and high-performance edge computing systems for broad sensor-rich physical AI applications, primarily including three major thrusts:

Scalable analog computing for efficient AI/ML inference and training by leveraging approximation error-bounded analog in-memory computing and algorithm co-design;
Learnable in-sensor compression and multi-modal sensor fusion for end-to-end efficient and high-performance visual processing (e.g., vision-language-action acceleration) and neural signal processing (e.g., cardiac anomaly detection);
Quantum physics-inspired and agentic AI-driven electronic design automation (EDA) for novel and efficient development of advanced physical AI hardware.

I am also interested in privacy-preserving machine learning in broad applications, such as data-driven EDA and in-sensor processing.

I'm actively recruiting self-motivated PhD students to join my group. Please refer to the Openings page for more details.

News

05/2026: Three papers are accepted by the IEEE International Conference on LLM-Aided Design (ICLAD), 2026. Congrats to Qiufeng and thanks to our collaborators.

04/2026: Receive an NSF grant as a PI. Great thanks to NSF for the support.

03/2026: One collaborative paper is accepted by the IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) 2026. Thanks to our collaborator, Prof. Xin from UCF.

11/2025: One regular paper is accepted by the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE) 2026. Congrats to Yiwen and Qiufeng.

11/2025: One collaborative paper is accepted by the IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) 2026. Thanks to our collaborator, Prof. Xin from UCF.

10/2025: One co-authored paper is accepted by TCAD. Thanks to our collaborator, Prof. Zou from SJTU.

08/2025: One invited paper is accepted by IEEE/ACM ICCAD 2025. Congrats to Shikai and Qiufeng, and thanks to our Collaborators, Prof. Chi from Rice University and Prof. Zhang from Northeastern University.

07/2025: Receive GWU CDRF support. This is a collaborative project with the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Thanks to our OVPR.

05/2025: Two regular papers are accepted by IEEE/ACM ISLPED 2025. Congrats to Yiwen and Qiufeng.

05/2025: One collaborative paper is accepted by ICML 2025.

03/2025: Two Late Breaking Results are accepted by DAC 2025. Congrats to Yiwen and Shikai.

02/2025: Two collaborative papers are accepted by DAC 2025.

01/2025: Two papers (one collaborative) are accepted by ISCAS 2025. Congrats to Zhiqiang.

01/2025: One collaborative paper is accepted by ICLR 2025 as a Spotlight (<5.1%).

10/2024: Receive the very competitive AIDRFIC award from NATCAST as a co-PI. Great thanks to our team leader, Prof. David Pan from UT Austin, and the support of NATCAST.

07/2024: Receive GWU UFF support. Thanks to our OVPR.

07/2024: One paper is accepted by TCAD.

05/2024: One co-authored paper is accepted by ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems.

04/2024: Yiwen receives A. Richard Newton Young Student Fellow Award from DAC 2024 (Student).

02/2024: One paper is accepted by DAC 2024.

11/2023: One paper is accepted by TCAD.

03/2023: One co-authored paper is accepted by ISCA 2023.

02/2023: One paper is accepted by DAC 2023.

02/2023: One paper is accepted by ICLR 2023.

01/2023: Two papers are accepted by ISCAS 2023 and invited for TCAS-II Special Issue.