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Jeff Zhang · ECE PhD @ UIUC

Researching intelligent hardware architecture & co-design for the AI age.

About Me

I am a first-year PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am driven by a passion for designing and optimizing hardware accelerators and compiler tools for modern workloads.

My current research focuses on compiler construction, hardware-software co-design, and intermediate representations (IR) for AI accelerators. I build systems that bridge the gap between high-level programming models (like PyTorch/NumPy) and physical execution units using LLVM/MLIR, Vitis HLS, Pallas/Mosaic, and custom hardware generation backends.

Experience

2026 - Present
PhD Student / Graduate Research Assistant
PlatformX @ UIUC
2023 - 2026
BS in Computer Engineering
UIUC

Writing & Ideas

Reflections on Hardware-Software Co-Design in ECE

Exploring intermediate representations and specialized target hardware in PhD studies at UIUC.

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Projects

NPU NumPy Co-design

npupy_xdna

A transparent NumPy backend offloading array operations to AMD Ryzen AI NPU cores (XDNA2). Implements "spatial template" kernels for cubic and elementwise workloads with an automated offload cost classifier and compiler passes via MLIR-AIE and Peano.

Tile Programming High Level Synthesis Co-design

tiled-ip

A dynamic-programming-driven hardware compiler for tile-based INT8 accelerators. Automatically traverses and stitches 11 parameterized IP cores into complete GPT-2 transformer blocks using shape-inference and AXI4-Stream.

Tile Programming High-Level Synthesis Co-design

tileweaver

A simple automated compiler path translating GPU kernel designs from TileLang into synthesizable HLS C++ (Vitis HLS/ScaleHLS-HIDA). Translates TIR to MLIR while preserving loop-tiling, online reductions, and shared-memory mappings.

Hardware Design STM32 CAD

popn2

In my free time I am also a rhythm game enthusiast. This is version 2 of a custom arcade pop'n music controller. Built around an STM32F072 mainboard with individual input pins and darlington arrays for 12V LEDs, featuring custom PCBs, firmware, and chassis.

Connect

Feel free to reach out to coordinate research, share ideas, or talk architecture & co-design!