Meet Assistant Professor Nicolás Wainstein

Like other newly appointed young faculty members, Nicolás Wainstein of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering is very excited about the opportunities he has at the Technion: “I expect to do research that will impact humanity. I enjoy it so much that it doesn’t feel like work.” After completing his PhD at the Technion, Wainstein chose a distinctive path that bridges industry and academia, building his research trajectory while remaining deeply connected to the university.

Born and raised in Uruguay, Wainstein made Aliyah to Israel to pursue his doctoral studies at the Technion. Following his PhD, he joined Intel, where he advanced cutting-edge research and development in analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits, focusing on high-speed parallel links such as processor-memory interfaces and die-to-die interconnects. At the same time, he became one of the first participants in the Technion’s Research Fellow from Industry program, launched in 2022 to strengthen collaboration between academia and industry. “Technion research fellows from industry boost synergy between industry and academia,” he explains. “It enabled me to conduct independent research at the Technion while working full-time in industry.”

In 2024, as his independent research matured and expanded, Wainstein transitioned to a full-time research fellowship at the Technion. His work during this period laid the foundation for his research group and future faculty role. In 2025, he became the first faculty member to move from the Research Fellow program into a tenure-track appointment, a milestone that reflects both the program’s vision and his rapidly growing research impact.

Nicolás’ academic career at the Technion was set in motion as a teenager in Uruguay, when he was active in a Zionist Youth Movement and came to Israel for a post-high school gap year. “I came here for the first time when I was 15 and fell in love with the country. When I came back in 2008 after high school, I realized I wanted to stay.” He returned to Uruguay to complete his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and in 2015 he moved to Israel with his wife—with the express intention of pursuing a direct-track Ph.D. at the Technion. “I made Aliyah knowing that I wanted to study at the Technion. This university has been my second home and my safe place since I made Aliyah. It is a remarkable bubble of coexistence with amazing people from different backgrounds.” He lives in Haifa with his wife and their five-year-old son and remains deeply connected to the Technion community both professionally and personally.

Wainstein’s Analog/Mixed-Signal Research Group (AMSG) focuses on integrated circuit design for AI hardware and high-speed links. “The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is pushing the limits of conventional digital computing architectures. Performance and energy efficiency are increasingly constrained by data movement, creating bottlenecks in computation, memory bandwidth, and interconnect performance. We are trying to solve this bottleneck through a multidisciplinary and holistic approach, combining analog/mixed-signal circuits, in-memory computing (IMC), and high-speed die-to-die links,” he explains. “At AMSG, we are exploring time-domain and digitally assisted mixed-signal architectures as a scalable approach for efficient hardware.” AMSG is one of the few labs in the world addressing this critical challenge through a holistic approach. Benefiting from his experience at Intel, Wainstein is intent on forming partnerships with industry leaders.

Dr. Wainstein has already received several prestigious awards, including the 2025 IEEE Non-Volatile Memory Technology Symposium Best Poster Award, the 2021 Hershel Rich Innovation Award, the 2020 IEEE Electron Devices Society Ph.D. Student Fellowship (awarded annually to three Ph.D. students worldwide), the 2020 Yablonovitch Research Prize, and the 2020 RBNI Prize for Excellence in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. He also received the RBNI Scholarship in 2020, and the 2019 Jury Award for Outstanding Students. He holds the Robert J. Shillman Career Advancement Chair.