Peijing Li

Quick link to my short-form Resume.

The magic of turning low-quality caffeine into high-quality engineering solutions, personified.

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in Stanford, CA. Previously, I received my B.S.E. in Computer Science and a minor in Civil Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in May 2024.

Research

My primary research interests lie in memory systems for domain-specific hardware accelerators, specifically in the context of AI/ML workloads. I am particularly interested in tackling the memory wall problem – particularly given the context of memory-intensive modern AI applications and the astronomical increases in demand for DRAM and SRAM capacity they bring. I believe the architectural solution is centered around the concept of heterogeneity to both on-chip and off-chip memory systems, where different types of data accesses are served by different specialized memory devices and arrays with varying trade-offs in latency, density, retention time, and energy consumption.

I am advised by Prof. Thierry Tambe at Stanford, and much of my research collaboration can be found through the Stanford Differentiated Access Memories Project.

Please refer to the Research page for a detailed list of my research experiences and projects, and to the Academics page for a detailed list of my coursework and academic projects.

Experiences

I am currently serving as a teaching assistant for Stanford’s CS 217: Hardware Accelerators for Machine Learning course in the winter quarter of 2025. This course covers the design, programming, and performance of modern AI accelerators, including architectural techniques, dataflow, tensor processing, memory hierarchies, and compilation for accelerators. I am currently designing lab assignments and leading relevant weekly discussion sections on numerical quantization, memory systems, and implementation of ML acclerators on FPGAs using high-level synthesis (HLS) workflows.

In terms of past work experience, I worked as a software test engineer intern at ASML in San Jose, CA during the summer of 2023, where I automated the Brion division’s automated regression testing pipeline for computational lithography software. Before that, I worked as an instructional aide for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan during the winter of 2023, where I managed lab sessions and office hours for the CEE 375: Sensors and Circuits course. Introducing CEE students to the world of sensors and signal processing and bridging the gap between prior civil engineering knowledge – that my students already had – and new electrical engineering concepts – that I was more familiar with – was an incredibly rewarding experience. I spent the summer after my freshman year of college at the Dell EMC subsidiary in my hometown of Shanghai, China, where I performed integration testing on the VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure software and the VMware Cloud Foundation software stack.

Extracurriculars and Service

The Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band has made up a significant part of my experience at Stanford so far ever since I joined in the fall of 2024, and I play marching drums, the glockenspiel, and the piccolo in the band. It is a place where, paradoxically, I can find a peace of mind and a sense of myself in the chaos and insanity that the band is known for.

I was a member of the Tau Beta Pi Michigan Gamma Chapter from 2023 to 2024. In terms of competitive team sports, I was a member of the University of Michigan Club Cycling Team from 2021 to 2023.

When it comes to slightly more fringe and frivolous interests, I have also been incredibly invested in the Touhou Project game series out of Japan. Try to catch me at an anime convention near you if you can!

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