AI Chip Center for Emerging Smart Systems (ACCESS) is proud to announce that its research project "High-Efficiency 3D AI Chip for Protein Sequence Design" has been awarded a Gold Medal at the prestigious 51st International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva. This distinguished honour underscores ACCESS leadership in advanced artificial intelligence area and serves as a strong recognition of the team’s achievements in pioneering next-generation AI computing technologies.
Protein sequence design is a critical component of many applications, including drug discovery, enzyme engineering, and synthetic biology. Given a protein backbone structure, it aims to predict compatible amino-acid sequences. State-of-the-art methods such as ProteinMPNN rely on deep learning, requiring GPU acceleration and incurring high energy consumption.
Led by Professor Tim Cheng, Vice‑President for Research and Development of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and Center Director of ACCESS, the research and development team has successfully developed a commercial‑grade 3D AI accelerator and test chip, AC‑Transformer‑RHB‑Lite. The chip integrates Resistive Random-Access Memory (ReRAM) with an ultra-low-power AI accelerator through 3D stacking, providing high computational throughput and storage capacity while significantly reducing energy consumption and manufacturing cost. This innovation achieves breakthroughs in Large Language Model (LLM) inference computing and overcomes computational and energy consumption bottlenecks in protein sequence design. The core technical advances of this commercial‑grade experimental chip were featured as a highlight paper at the International Solid‑State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2026), widely regarded as “Chip Olympic”.
Furthermore, the team has developed a proprietary software toolchain to customise and optimise the ProteinMPNN model to fully exploit the 3D AI architecture. This efficiently accelerates ProteinMPNN’s complex computations, enabling low‑latency amino‑acid sequence prediction, ultra‑low‑power and significantly advancing protein sequence design in a sustainable manner.
The International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva is one of the world’s largest annual innovation forums, and this recognition affirms ACCESS’s technological breakthroughs. ACCESS is an HKUST wholly owned research centre and participated in the exhibition as part of the HKUST delegation. HKUST affiliated teams achieved an impressive total of 62 awards at this year’s exhibition — including 13 jury commendation gold medals, 20 gold medals, 20 silver medals and 9 bronze medals. For details of HKUST's exhibits and the full list of awardees at the exhibition, please visit:
https://hkust.edu.hk/zh-hant/news/hkust-wins-record-breaking-accolades-51st-international-exhibition-inventions-geneva
ACCESS is dedicated to its mission of driving sustainable development and improving quality of life through AI innovation. The Centre looks forward to continuing its pursuit of groundbreaking research that will shape the future technological landscape.
About AI Chip Center for Emerging Smart Systems
Al Chip Center for Emerging Smart System (ACCESS) is a multi-disciplinary research center under the InnoHK initiative of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government. Founded and wholly owned by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in collaboration on research with world-renowned local and overseas universities. ACCESS is Asia’s first transnational consortium to perform research and development on AI chip design, we are dedicated to advancing integrated circuit (IC) design and design automation technologies to enable novel data-centric computing paradigms to support a wide range of AI applications. The research programs in ACCESS span from fundamental/ curiosity research to mid-stream applied research and actual prototype development for technology demonstration, technology transfer to industry and spin-off under the entrepreneur incubation program.
