Microelectronics underpin the technologies that drive modern society, but the way these systems are designed is undergoing a significant transformation. The emergence of open-source hardware ecosystems and chiplet-based design approaches, which emphasize modular integration of reusable components, is lowering barriers to entry and expanding who can innovate.

Antonino Tumeo, a distinguished computer scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), is coediting a special issue of Computer specifically focused on “Democratizing Microelectronics.” The issue highlights the ongoing shift toward openness and modularity in hardware design, and its implications for research, innovation, education, and industry. Submissions will be accepted until August 1, 2026, and publication of the issue is planned for April 2027.

“This is a pivotal moment for microelectronics,” said Tumeo. “Open-source tools and chiplet-based integration are fundamentally changing how systems are designed and who can participate in that process. Greater openness is also making it easier to access the data, design artifacts, and develop the code needed to apply artificial intelligence to hardware design—capabilities previously limited to a small number of organizations. This special issue aims to capture that momentum and showcase emerging directions across the community.”

Computer is the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society, publishing peer-reviewed articles on the full spectrum of computing technologies. Its focus is on “useful information that is applicable to everyday work environments.”

Tumeo plays key roles in multiple microelectronics initiatives at PNNL, including the Department of Energy–funded projects Democratization of Co-design for Energy-Efficient Heterogeneous Computing (DeCoDe), which is a Microelectronics Research Center project, and End-to-end Co-design for Performance, Energy Efficiency, and Security in AI-enabled Computational Science (ENCODE).

As deputy principal investigator of DeCoDe, Tumeo contributes to advancing an open chiplet-based ecosystem aimed at reducing the cost and complexity of designing heterogeneous next-generation computing architectures, including both digital and analog accelerators. ENCODE is focused on developing scalable methodologies to design and evaluate prototypes to support future computing technologies. Within ENCODE, he leads efforts in the Intelligent Hardware Design Thrust, developing open-source tools to automate the end-to-end design of energy-efficient systems from algorithm to silicon implementation.

Tumeo joined PNNL in 2009 as a postdoctoral research associate and has developed a research trajectory spanning modeling and simulation of high-performance architectures, hardware-software codesign and specialization with a particular focus on irregular applications and data analytics, electronic design automation, high-level synthesis, reconfigurable computing, and emerging computing paradigms. His work includes the SODA toolchain, a fully end-to-end open-source framework enabling “Python-to-silicon” accelerator design, which received a 2022 Best Paper Award from IEEE Micro. He also cochaired a Department of Energy workshop on analog computing, which led to a recently published report that explores new directions such as computing with natural phenomena.