He is a full professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Associate Vice President of Research Centers and Platforms, and the head of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL).

His contributions in these areas always target to go beyond hardware and software boundaries for efficient energy use by developing (1) new thermal‐aware optimization and run‐time management of 2D/3D multi‐processor servers and data centers, and (2) cross-layer design methodologies for ultra‐low power smart wearables, edge artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT systems.

[6][7] A clear example of the long-term impact of Prof. Atienza in this area is the development of the 3D Interlayer Cooling Emulator (3D-ICE) tool,[8] which was used in the design of Aquasar, the first chip-level water-cooled server by IBM.

The different versions and updates of 3D-ICE have been available since 2012 as open-source for the research community in computer engineering and EDA tools, and is used for transient thermal modeling of 2D/3D MPSoC designs with multiple cooling technologies by numerous academic and industrial groups worldwide.

Then, in the last years, he has proposed to enhance microcontroller-based architectures with HEAL-WEAR, a novel kernel processing accelerator based on coarse-grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) technology to enable multi-parametric smart wearables with edge artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

This new MPSoC wearable architectures and the related AI algorithms for automatic bio-signal analysis and pathologies detection are licensed and used by a large number of providers of ambulatory, continuous, real-time outpatient management solutions.