Themis_Prodromakis

Themis Prodromakis

Themis Prodromakis

British electronics engineer (born 1981)

Themistoklis "Themis" Prodromakis, FRSC, FBCS, FInstP, FIET, CEng (Greek: Θεμιστοκλής Προδρομάκης, born 1 September 1981) is an electronic engineer. In 2022 he joined the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh as the Regius Professor of Engineering.[1] Prodromakis is also Director of the Centre for Electronics Frontiers and holds an RAEng Chair in Emerging Technologies in AI hardware technologies. He is the founder and director of ArC Instruments[2] that commercialises high-performance testing instruments for semiconductor technologies.

Themis Prodromakis at the UK Blavatnik awards.
Themis Prodromakis

He has been involved in developing emerging metal-oxide resistive random-access memory technologies[3] with applications in embedded electronics.[4] and biomedicine.[5] His tool developments went hand in hand with the optimisation of solid-state device technologies, allowing him to demonstrate world-record performance in analogue memory,[6] where single devices can store over 100 discernible memory states. He showcased the use of memristor technologies in a variety of applications: on-node bio-signal processors[7] that compared to CMOS state-of-art achieve a 200 better compression efficiency and over 2-orders of magnitude power savings per channel; in-silico implementations of unsupervised learning,[8] empowering the handling of big-unlabelled-data efficiently and robustly; and a novel microelectronics design paradigm that fuses the analogue and digital worlds[9] and empowers energy efficient implementations of analogue reconfigurable gates. He was also the first to demonstrate a bio-hybrid network[10] comprising real and artificial neurons[11] that was linked via memristor synapse emulators over the internet.[12]

He has published over 350 research papers[13] and holds more than 10 patents in the field of semiconductors and AI hardware technologies. His contributions in memristive technologies and applications have brought this emerging technology one step closer to the electronics industry for which he was recognised as a 2021 Blavatnik Award UK Honoree in Physical Sciences and Engineering.

He established and directed the Lloyd's Register Foundation International Consortium for Nanotechnologies, a global initiative that supported 52 talented individuals for building a safer world with nanotechnologies. He also played a key role in growing the remit of memristors by inaugurating and chairing MEMRISYS.[14] In 2020 he was appointed Editor in Chief of Frontiers on Nanotechnology.[15] He is a keen advocate for explaining his research to the public through outreach activities,[16] lectures and general interest articles.[17]

References

  1. [1]
    "University appoints new Regius Chair of Engineering | School of Engineering". www.eng.ed.ac.uk.
  2. [2]
    "About Us". www.arc-instruments.co.uk.
  3. [3]
    "Watch Out, Transistors: Memristors Gaining Traction". Engineering.com.
  4. [4]
    Bush, Steve (June 8, 2018). "Memristors key to nano-scale analogue/digital adaptive hardware".
  5. [5]
    "Memristors Could be a Boon to Brain-to-Prosthesis Communication - IEEE Spectrum".
  6. [6]
    Bush, Steve (January 26, 2018). "Southampton breaks memristor record with 7bits/cell".
  7. [7]
    Gupta, Isha; Serb, Alexantrou; Khiat, Ali; Zeitler, Ralf; Vassanelli, Stefano; Prodromakis, Themistoklis (September 26, 2016). "Real-time encoding and compression of neuronal spikes by metal-oxide memristors". Nature Communications. 7 (1): 12805. Bibcode:2016NatCo...712805G. doi:10.1038/ncomms12805. PMC 5052668. PMID 27666698.
  8. [8]
    Serb, Alexander; Bill, Johannes; Khiat, Ali; Berdan, Radu; Legenstein, Robert; Prodromakis, Themis (September 29, 2016). "Unsupervised learning in probabilistic neural networks with multi-state metal-oxide memristive synapses". Nature Communications. 7 (1): 12611. Bibcode:2016NatCo...712611S. doi:10.1038/ncomms12611. PMC 5056401. PMID 27681181.
  9. [9]
    Serb, Alexantrou; Khiat, Ali; Prodromakis, Themistoklis (June 4, 2018). "Seamlessly fused digital-analogue reconfigurable computing using memristors". Nature Communications. 9 (1): 2170. Bibcode:2018NatCo...9.2170S. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04624-8. PMC 5986819. PMID 29867104.
  10. [10]
    Smith, Jonathan (February 27, 2020). "Scientists Connect Brain Cells to Machines Over the Internet".
  11. [11]
    "New study allows brain and artificial neurons to link up over the web". ScienceDaily.
  12. [12]
    "Artificial and biological neurons just talked over the internet". Futurism.
  13. [13]
    "Themis Prodromakis". scholar.google.co.uk.
  14. [14]
    "International Conference on Memristive Materials, Devices & Systems (MEMRISYS 2017) Themis and his team give a presentation on "The use of dielectric barrier layers for multibit operation in TiOxbased memristors"". www.forte.ac.uk.
  15. [15]
    Team, Metropolis. "Frontiers in Nanotechnology". Frontiers.
  16. [16]
    Prodromakis, Themis (August 25, 2017). "Introducing the nanoworld". Nature Nanotechnology. 12 (8): 832. doi:10.1038/nnano.2017.164. PMID 28775350.
  17. [17]
    "Nanotechnology: The search for micro miracles". The Independent. March 23, 2016.
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Themis_Prodromakis, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.