ECE’s Qiangfei Xia and Colleagues Receive Two Awards for Trailblazing Research

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Qiangfei Xia, the Dev and Linda Gupta Professor in the UMass Amherst Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, is collaborating with two teams of interdisciplinaryresearchers on two projects from the U.S. Army Research Office ($2.1 million to UMass) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Genesis Mission ($750,000 to the team).

Xia’s collaborators for the Army Research project come from Pennsylvania State University(lead), the University of Southern California, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, while his colleagues on the Genesis research include Northeastern University (lead), Drexel University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Argonne National Laboratory.

The project for the Army Research Office is developing an intelligent-sensing node for unmanned aerial and ground systems while operating in crowded and contested electromagnetic environments. As Xia summarizes the project, it aims “at developing bio-inspired hardware for radio-frequency signal processing.”

As the research team explains the problems that its new intelligent-sensing node addresses, “Unmanned aerial systems and unmanned ground systems…[often operate] in complex environments where they must autonomously detect hostile emitters, identify threats, avoid collisions, and coordinate actions across swarms … In such scenarios, conventional centralized command and control is often too slow, too vulnerable, or too resource-intensive to ensure survivability and mission success.”

The research team says that “Our proposed solution directly addresses these challenges by combining nature-inspired signal processing with heterogeneous hardware integration.”

The researchers will develop intelligent sensing nodes that are ultra-compact, low-power, and modular. A single node must integrate sensing, computation, memory, communication, and energy management into a miniaturized package deployable on drones or small ground vehicles.

As the team says, “Achieving this integration under extreme size, weight, and power constraints demands cutting-edge approaches beyond incremental improvements to digital architecture.”

The DOE Genesis Mission is funding a second research endeavor that, as Xia explains, “is a nine-month phase I effort with a total budget of $750,000 for the team. Its goal is to build and test AI-enabled [artificial-intelligence-enabled] scientific workflows, evaluate their merit, and prove their trajectory toward transformative capabilities before qualifying for large-scale Phase II investments.”

According to the DOE, “The Genesis Mission unites DOE National Labs, industry, academia, and more to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science, and national security.”

The Phase I Genesis Project is funding what Xia and his colleagues, led by Northeastern University, call “Self-Driving Discovery and Co-Design of MXene Memristors for 3D Compute-in-Memory Systems.”

MXene memristors are made of tunable, conductive, extremelythin, twodimensional materials which can process and store information concurrently, thereby enabling high-density, lowpower, three-dimensional (3D) “computeinmemory” architectures.

As Xia summarizes this DOE research, “We are leveraging AI to accelerate the development of next-generation memristive devices.”

Xia and his collaborators explain that “In this project, we will systematically exploit the diverse device characteristics of MXene-based memristors. By carefully selecting and integrating combinations of top electrodes, switching layers, and bottom electrodes, we aim to tailor device behaviors towards the 3D compute-in-memory system objective.”

The team adds that “We will design MXenes – including their atomic structure, tunable surface chemistry, and composition – to achieve the required device matrices. We will leverage AI-guided active learning to accelerate the discovery of optimal MXene material and device designs.” (September 2026)