Tao Wei
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ph.D., 2011 - Missouri University of Science and Technology
Electrical Engineering
M.S., 2008 - Missouri University of Science and Technology
Electrical Engineering
B.S., 2006 - Nanjing University of Technology
Mechanical Engineering
Contact Information
Office: 336 Fluor Daniel Building
Phone: 864.656.5922
Email: twei2@clemson.edu
About the PI:
Prof. Tao Wei leads NEXT Lab. He began as an Assistant Professor at the University of Rhode Island in 2012, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017, and to Full Professor in 2022. As of 2023, he serves as a Professor and Director of NEXT Lab, coordinates the Clemson Cadence Project, and holds an adjunct position at the University of Rhode Island. His research is funded by NSF, ONR, NASA, and private industry partners, and he received the ONR YIP award in 2017.
A highlight is FastFlowLM Inc., an NSF-sponsored research effort and a NEXT Lab spinoff startup company focused on efficient LLM inference on dataflow chips, which later joined AMD and became ROCm/FastFlowLM. It is now a main AMD NPU inference engine serving the open-source community and customers. FastFlowLM achieved best-in-class performance across the evaluated models, and AMD recognized its potential by integrating the technology and team into their inference stack. AMD blog post.
Research Interests
- Efficient Systems for LLMs: End-to-end system design for efficient Generative AI models (LLM, VLM, ASR, Omini, VLA, Diffusion, etc.) inference and training, with emphasis on latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and deployment on resource-constrained platforms.
- Domain-Specific Architecture (DSA) for Scientific Computing: Architecture and accelerator co-design for scientific workloads, including model-driven and optimization-centric computation.
- Mixed-Signal Circuit Design for Sensing Systems: Analog, digital, and optical circuit/system design for sensor and sensing applications.