Home

CADathlon at ICCAD

SIGDA's CADathlon at ICCAD

Sunday, Nov. 6, 2011  8 am - 5 pm Double Tree Hotel, San Jose, CA

 
 

[trophy]

Welcome to the CADathlon @ ICCAD 

Congratulations to the 2011 Winners (Tied for First Place)
Ko-Fan Tien & Li-Jui Chen (National Chiao Tung University)
Michael Zimmer & Baruch Sterin (U. California Berkeley)

In the spirit of the long-running ACM programming contest, the CADathlon challenges students in their CAD knowledge, and their problem solving, programming, and teamwork skills. It serves as an innovative initiative to assist in the development of top students in the EDA field. The contest will provide a platform for SIGDA, academia, and industry to focus attention on the best and brightest of next generation CAD professionals.
The students will be given a number of problems that range in difficulty and topics. Information about the CAD areas, relevant papers, and potentially a software framework that will run on Linux will be released one week before the competition. Students will be allowed to work in teams of two. At the contest, students will be given the problem statements and an example test data, but they will not have the judges' test data. Solutions will be judged on correctness and efficiency. The team that passes the most testcases is declared the winner. A handsome prize awaits the winning team. The judges are experts in EDA from both academia and industry.
 
During the competition students will be presented with six problems in the following areas:

  • Circuit Design & Analysis
  • Physical Design
  • Logic & High-Level Synthesis
  • System Design & Analysis
  • Functional Verification
  • Bio-EDA

The competition is open to all graduate students specializing in CAD currently enrolled full-time in a Ph.D. granting institution in any country. Partial or full travel grants will be provided for qualifying students.
 
This year one of the CADathlon problems will involve programming a high performance GPU to solve an EDA problem using the CUDA programming language. Please review the CUDA Programming Guide prior to the competition this year! A copy of the guide will be provided on the contest machines.
 
This project is sponsored by SIGDA, with generous contributions from the National Science Foundation, the Taiwan Intelligent Electronics Consortium, Magma and IBM Research.