Five PhD studentships at CASCADE, University of Cambridge

The CASCADE Research Centre at the University of Cambridge has five PhD studentships available to start in October 2026. We’re looking for strong computer science candidates with interests in any of the areas of computer architecture, compilers, design verification and AI / machine learning.
Deadline: 2 December 2025
Website: https://www.cascade.cst.cam.ac.uk/

CASCADE
Launched in 2024, the Computer Architecture and Semiconductor Design Centre (CASCADE) at the University of Cambridge performs research into some of the grand challenges in computer architecture, design automation and semiconductors. We have expertise across the breadth of the area, encompassing the design and optimisation of general-purpose microprocessors, specialised accelerators, on-chip interconnect and memory systems, along with verification, compilation and networking.

Challenges
PhD students in CASCADE work on significant research challenges during their studies. We’re currently accepting applications within two research themes with broad challenges for each.

Computer architectures of the future
Programs contain a significant amount of semantic information about their operation. However, modern toolchains – by design – throw this information away as a program is compiled, leaving just the operations encoded in the processor’s usually simple, RISC-based ISA. This theme considers instead passing on this information to the processor, allowing it to execute the application with knowledge of the future that it did not have to infer itself. The overall aim is to consider how augmenting program binaries with performance-relevant semantic information can directly improve execution speed, resource utilisation, or power usage.

Accelerated verification
Today, hardware designers and the EDA tool ecosystem face unprecedented innovation pressure, being offered abundant transistors, endless opportunities for specialisation, and several high-demand domain-specific use cases. Breakthroughs in AI, formal methods, new compiler technology, and the potential for hardware to accelerate EDA create critical opportunities to deliver order-of-magnitude improvements to EDA. Accelerating verification, the central hardware design bottleneck, and the systematic synthesis of novel hardware designs are the most promising areas for innovation. This theme considers work towards the ultimate moonshot goal: a ‘push button’ solution to EDA that takes high-level requirements and produces an optimised and fully verified hardware design.

Research Group
The Computer Architecture Group consists of PostDocs and PhD students investigating performance, security, reliability and efficiency in future systems. We’re a broad group encompassing traditional microarchitecture, compiler toolchains, machine-learning systems and quantum computer architecture, developing solutions within compilers, computer architectures and all associated tools. The group sits within the Department of Computer Science and Technology, a vibrant and internationally leading environment. Collaboration with researchers at other universities and industry around the world is encouraged and there are strong links within the group with local, national and international companies.

Applications
We seek highly motivated candidates with a strong background in computer science (1st class honours degree or equivalent, although a Master’s is particularly desirable) with a particular interest in computer architecture, compilers and / or associated areas. Applicants should identify a potential supervisor, contact them to discuss research areas and then write a short research proposal. Our dedicated applications page describes the process in more detail. This position is open to applicants from anywhere in the world; all university fees will be paid by the project and the successful candidate will receive a stipend at the UKRI rate. We especially encourage applications from female and other students currently under-represented in the area.

For further information, contact Professor Timothy Jones.