Stefan Wiefels honored with the Umbrella Award

At this year's Umbrella Symposium, Jülich researcher Stefan Wiefels received the Umbrella Award for his work on "Variability-Aware Characterization of Memristors for Neuromorphic Applications". With his comprehensive electrical characterization of memristive devices with respect to their variability in switching behavior and their device-to-device variance, Stefan Wiefels has shown forward-looking potential for how memristive devices can be optimally used in neuromorphic computing. Functionality ranges from non-volatile digital bit memories to near-analog devices made of memristive crosspoint matrices that can be trained with pulse trains to mimic synapse learning in artificial neural networks. For many AI tasks, this ultimately means more energy-efficient parallel compute-in-memory - just like our brains do.

The Umbrella Cooperation is a trilateral collaboration between Forschungszentrum Jülich, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and RWTH Aachen University, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

The symposium was held in Haifa in the anniversary year on the topic "Life Science & Engineering: Data Analytics, Neuroscience & Multiscale Biomedical Engineering". The award is given to outstanding researchers in the field of the respective symposium topic, and one award winner is chosen for each of the three institutions.

In addition to Dr. Stefan Wiefels from the Peter Grünberg Institute in Jülich, Dr. Arielle Fischer (Technion) and Dr. Roger Molto Pallares (RWTH Aachen University) received the Umbrella Award.