Main Page

A collaborative website for Prof. Marc Riedel's research group at the University of Minnesota.

About the Group

The group consists of Prof. Marc Riedel and his students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Our research activities encompass topics in logic synthesis and verification, as well as in synthetic and computational biology. A broad theme is the application of expertise from digital circuit design to new areas.

• See our "People" page for a list of everyone in the group.
• See our "Research" page for an overview of our research activities.
• See our "Papers, Presentations, Theses, and Patents" page for our papers, presentations, theses, and funding proposals.

Announcements

• Our paper MITRA: Reconfigurable, Low-Latency, and Power-Efficient In-Memory Stochastic Architecture for Transcendental Functions received a Best Paper Award at the 2026 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED).
• We joined a $500,000 NSF/MeitY project on energy-efficient quantum-material magnetic tunnel junctions for unconventional computing (joint with UMN colleagues Jian-Ping Wang and Ulya Karpuzcu).
• FemtoFluidics, the startup launched from our research, received a $294,932 NSF SBIR award, together with a $20,000 NSF I-Corps supplement, for Drug Discovery meets Moore's Law: Synthesizing DNA-Encoded Libraries with Electronics.
• We welcome two new postdocs, Arnav Solanki and Farzad Razi!
• Our paper Digital Circuits and Neural Networks Based on Acid-Base Chemistry Implemented by Robotic Fluid Handling appeared in Nature Communications.
• Ajay is leaving our group (our loss). He is joining the Ph.D. program at MIT (their gain).
• Arnav has completed his Ph.D..
• We have received a $1,000,000 NSF grant for research on DNA storage (joint with Kate Adamala and David Soloveichik).
• Marc was named an Oracle Research Fellow.
• We have received a $200,000 grant from Oracle.
• We have received a $115,000 grant from Seagate for research on DNA storage.
• We have received a $200,000 NSF grant for computational work on COVID-19.
• The Board of Regents of the University of Minnesota has promoted Marc to Full Professor.
• Our paper Computing Mathematical Functions Using DNA via Fractional Coding appeared in Scientific Reports.
• We have received a $2,200,000 DARPA grant through the Molecular Informatics program to pursue research on DNA computing (joint with Olgica Milenkovic and David Soloveichik).
• Hassan has completed his Ph.D. He has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Louisiana.
• Ahmad has completed his Ph.D. He has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Kentucky.
• Our paper on polysynchronous clocking was the IEEE Transactions on Computers "Feature Paper of the Month."
• Our work on a deterministic approach to stochastic computing has received critical acclaim: it upends the conventional thinking on stochastic computing (a field that we pioneered back in 2008).
• Ahmad has received the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.
• We received two NSF grants:
  • $800,000 for a proposal titled Back to the Future with Printed, Flexible Electronics Design (joint with UMN colleagues Kia Bazargan, Ramesh Harjani, David Lilja, and Dan Frisbie),
  • $400,000 for a proposal titled Advanced Signal Processing with DNA (joint with UMN colleague Keshab Parhi).
• John has earned his Ph.D. He joined Rockwell Collins.
• Mustafa has earned his Ph.D. He has accepted a tenure-track position at the Istanbul Technical University.
• Hua has earned his Ph.D. He joined Synopsys.
• We received a $400,000 grant from the NSF for research on signal processing with DNA (joint with UMN colleague Keshab Parhi).
• John received the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.
• We received a $300,000 grant from the NSF for research on stochastic computing (joint with UMN colleagues Kia Bazargan, Ramesh Harjani, and David Lilja).
• The Board of Regents of the University of Minnesota has conferred indefinite tenure on Marc.
• Weikang has earned his Ph.D. He has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Michigan–Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute.
• Weikang has received the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.
• We have received a $100,000 grant for research on synthetic biology from the Digital Technology Center (joint with UMN colleagues Yiannis Kaznessis and Claudia Schmidt-Dannert).
• We have received a $200,000 grant from the NSF for research on signal processing with DNA (joint with UMN colleague Keshab Parhi).
• We have received a $500,000 NSF grant along with Marc's NSF CAREER Award.
• Marc has received the NSF CAREER Award for his research on "things small, wet, and random." This is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty.
• We have received a $78,000 grant for research on stochastic simulation of chemical reactions from the BICB program (joint with IBM Rochester).
• We have received a $325,000 grant for research on probabilistic computing from the Center on Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics (FENA), a joint Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)/Department of Defense research center.
• Our paper The Synthesis of Cyclic Combinational Circuits received the Best Paper Award at the 2003 ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC).