Google Funds Fabrication of NUST’s Indigenous ASIC for Super Resolution

Electrical Engineering Department of MCS-NUST has achieved a significant milestone with Google’s $5,000 grant to fabricate an ASIC designed to accelerate a machine learning algorithm, namely the Super Resolution CNN’s execution for real-time inferencing. This grant is a proud achievement with the campus set to receive its first indigenously designed ASIC-for-AI in 2025.

Under supervision of Asst. Prof. Dr. Hussain Ali, principal investigator, designer Obaidullah Ahmed indigenously designed an ASIC for a SR-CNN accelerator as a final year project with the development team including Ayesha Rauf, Syeda Fareeha Batool Zaidi, and Kashif Murad Baigal.

The ASIC, set for commercialization, promises to transform the media entertainment and television broadcast industry by allowing high-resolution image and video reconstruction of originally low-quality content in real-time, thanks to the accelerated computing architecture for the aforementioned machine learning algorithm.