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Wen Yuyang fengse

Speaking of Tsinghua’s ace major, what do you think?

Many people’s first reaction may be “your department” and “Yao ban”——

One is the computer department of Tsinghua University, which is recognized as the most powerful in China, and the other is the “computer science experiment class of Tsinghua School” headed by Yao Qizhi, the only Chinese winner of the Turing Award.

The “soft” side of Tsinghua computer is now shining brightly, but in fact, in the field of computer hardware, graduates from Tsinghua university can be called to support half of the industry.

The common name behind them, Tsinghua Department of electronic engineering, has just celebrated its 70th birthday.

In the past 70 years, the Department of electronics of Tsinghua university trained the first batch of computer hardware and semiconductor talents in China. Since then, there is no lack of the emergence of the “golden generation”

Such inheritance has left a deep impression in academia, the Internet and the semiconductor industry.

Once a large number of academicians, now the “Post-00” academic power is rising

As one of the three earliest engineering departments established by Tsinghua University, the academic status of Tsinghua electronics department can be seen from the academician lineup celebrating the 70th anniversary of Tsinghua University:

Zhou Bingkun, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and professor of the Department of electronic engineering, Hou chaohuan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wu Hequan, academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering, fan Bangkui, academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering, LV Yueguang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peng Lianmao, academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering, Dong Jiahong, academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering, Dai Qionghai, academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering and professor of the Department of electronic engineering, Luo Yi, academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering, etc.

From Meng Zhaoying, the first head of the Department in the 1950s, to Lu Jianhua, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Luo Yi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering, it can be said that the Department of electronics of Tsinghua has never lacked academicians.

Pull in the timeline, this academic gene is still continuing to inherit, develop and bear fruit.

Take the “post-90s” of Tsinghua EE as an example.

Chen Yiran, a full professor in the Department of electronic and computer engineering of Duke University and IEEE / ACM fellow, is a 94 year old alumnus in the Department of electronics of Tsinghua University.

He received his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from Tsinghua University in 1998 and 2001 respectively.

In a series of interviews with “70 people in 70 years” of Tsinghua Electronics Department, Professor Chen Yiran described his career in Tsinghua as “endless aftertaste” and revealed an impressive past:

During his master’s degree, Chen Yiran started a business with his classmates, so that he seldom went to the laboratory and delayed a lot of scientific research progress.

At that time, his mentor Professor Fan Chongcheng took the initiative to talk to him. After hearing Chen Yiran’s idea that “I learned a lot of things I couldn’t learn in college outside”, Professor Fan said after a long silence:

I think there must be something that can only be learned here.

It was this sentence that impressed Chen Yiran and affected his later career choice:

In the end, I chose to be a university teacher and concentrate on research on campus. In fact, it also has a great relationship with teacher fan’s “beating the head”.

Today, in addition to his status as a professor of Duke University, he also serves as the director of the NSF new sustainable and Intelligent Computing (ASIC) enterprise university cooperation research center (iucrc) and the joint director of Duke Computing Evolutionary Intelligence Center (CEI), focusing on the research of new memory and storage systems, computer learning and neuromorphological computing, and mobile computing systems.

Before entering the academic field, Professor Chen Yiran also spent five years in industry and engaged in R & D at Synopsys and Seagate.

The latest news is that Professor Chen Yiran also teamed up with Tsinghua alumni Yang Yue to enter the AI chip market and set up apple core technology to promote the research and application of AI chip in memory computing technology.

Professor Wang Yu, who is currently the head of the Department of electronic engineering of Tsinghua University and the first post-80s head of the Department of electronics, became a member of the Department of electronics as early as 1998.

In 2002, he graduated from the Department of electronic engineering of Tsinghua University, and then continued to study for a doctor in the Department. He received a doctor’s degree in 2007.

It is worth mentioning that Professor Wang Yu participated in the establishment of AI chip company Shenjian in 2016, and his students Yao song and Shan Yi are the founding members of the company.

Shenjian was one of the fastest growing AI chip start-ups in China at that time. In 2018, Shenjian was acquired by Xilinx, the world’s largest FPGA manufacturer.

The “post-00s” in the Department of electronics of Tsinghua University are also beginning to emerge.

For example, grade 07 Tsinghua EE Fangfei. She received a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University in 2011 and a doctor’s degree in computer science from the University of Southern California in 2016.

Now, she is an assistant professor at the software research institute of the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research direction is computational game theory and its application in the field of security and sustainability.

This year, five Tsinghua alumni, including Fang Fei and Chen Danqi, a graduate of Yao class, won the Sloan research award. The award has attracted much attention in the name of “Nobel vane”.

Tsinghua EE graduates in the field of Internet

In addition to inheriting in academic circles and opening the resumes of Internet giants, the appearance rate of “Tsinghua Department of Electronics” is also remarkable.

For example, xie Yuan, chief scientist of Ali pingtouge.

Xie Yuan is also a “post-90s” in the Department of electronics of Tsinghua University. He enrolled in Tsinghua University in 1991.

After receiving his doctorate in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2002, xie Yuan worked at IBM for one year, but soon returned to academia and joined Pennsylvania State University. Just five years later, he got tenure and was promoted to full professor in 2012.

But in Xie Yuan’s opinion:

The problems of industry can affect the topic selection of academic circles; The achievements of academia can promote the application of new technologies in industry. Only the close combination of academia and industry can promote new directions and new research, which is a good positive cycle.

Therefore, during his vacation from 2012 to 2013, he stepped into the industry again, joined AMD and was responsible for establishing and leading the research department of AMD Beijing R & D center.

When he returned to academia again, xie Yuan transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara as a full professor in the Department of electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)