A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award 2025: Call for Nominations

SIGDA Service Awards 2023

Remembering Arvind

Sunday, July 28, 2024 Yibo Lin News

From Friends, Colleagues, and Students of Arvind

It is with a heavy heart that we write to share the news that on June 17th 2024, we lost our beloved colleague, mentor, and friend Arvind. A...

Call for SIGDA Newsletter Editor-in-Chief

Sunday, November 05, 2023 Yibo Lin News

ACM SIGDA announces the call for Editor-in-Chief for the SIGDA Newsletter, a monthly publication for news and event information in the design automation area. The Editor-in-Chief, along with the e...

IEEE/ACM A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation

Tuesday, September 12, 2023 Yibo Lin News

The IEEE/ACM A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation was conferred at DAC 2023 upon Moshe Vardi and Pierre Wolper for their research work “An Automata-Theoretic Ap...

Highlights of CADAthlon Brazil 2023

Tuesday, September 12, 2023 Yibo Lin News

The CADAthlon Brazil 2023 – 3rd Brazilian Programming Contest for Design Automation of Integrated Circuits (https://csbc.sbc.org.br/2023/cadathlon-brasil-en/) took place on August 8th in João Pess...

Prof. Ron Rohrer receives ACM SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award @ DAC 2023

Tuesday, September 12, 2023 Yibo Lin News

https://www.dac.com/About/Conference-Archive/60th-DAC-2023/Awards-2023

For the introduction and evolution of simulation and analysis techniques that have supported the design and test of inte...

Events

UDemo@DAC

Saturday, April 06, 2024 Yibo Lin SIGDA Events

34th ACM SIGDA / IEEE CEDA University Demonstration Call for Participation!!

Date: June 23-27, 2024
Location: Moscone Center West, San Francisco

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submission should be ...

LIVE

Sunday, November 05, 2023 Yibo Lin SIGDA Events

SIGDA Live is a series of webinars, launched monthly or bi-monthly, on topics (either technical or non-technical) of general interest to the SIGDA community. The talks in general fall on the last ...

CADathlon@ICCAD

Sunday, October 29, 2023 Hui-Ru Jiang SIGDA Events

Sunday, Oct. 29, 2023 08:00 AM – 05:00 PM, In-Person

Gallery Ballroom, The Hyatt Regency San Francisco Downtown SoMa, San Francisco, CA, USA

Welcome to CADathlon@ICCAD

CADathlon...

HACK@DAC

Tuesday, September 12, 2023 Yibo Lin SIGDA Events

HACK@DAC is a hardware security challenge contest, co-located with the Design and Automation Conference (DAC), for finding and exploiting security-critical vulnerabilities in hardware and firmware...

SDC@DAC

Tuesday, September 12, 2023 Yibo Lin SIGDA Events

System Design Contest at DAC 2023

The DAC System Design Contest focuses on object detection and classification on an embedded GPU or FPGA system. Contestants will receive a training dataset pro...

Awards

ONFA

Thursday, April 03, 2025 Yibo Lin Awards

SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award

Call for Applications

The ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award (ONFA) recognizes a junior faculty member early in her or his academic career who demonstrates outstanding potential as an educator and/or researcher in the field of electronic design automation. While prior research and/or teaching accomplishments are important, the selection committee will especially consider the impact that the candidate has had on her or his department and on the EDA field during the initial years of their academic appointment. The 2025 award will be presented at ICCAD 2025, consisting of a USD $1,000 cash prize to the faculty member, along with a plaque and a citation.

Eligibility: Outstanding new faculty who are developing academic careers in areas related to electronic design automation are encouraged to apply for this award. Note that this award is not intended for senior or highly experienced investigators who have already established independent research careers, even if they are new to academia. Candidates must have recently completed at least one full academic year and no more than four and a half full academic years in a tenure-track position. Applications will also be considered from people whose appointments are continuing (non-visiting) positions with substantial educational responsibilities regardless whether or not they are tenure track. Persons holding research-only positions are not eligible. Exceptions to the timing requirements will be made for persons who have interrupted their academic careers for substantive reasons, such as family or medical leave. The presence of such reasons must be attested by the sponsoring institution, but no explanation is needed.

Deadline for the 2025 Award: 31 May 2025

Application: Candidates applying for the award must submit the following to the selection committee:

a 2-page statement summarizing the candidate’s teaching and research accomplishments since beginning their current academic position, as well as an indication of plans for further development over the next five years;
a copy of a current curriculum vitae;
a letter from either the candidate’s department chair or dean endorsing the application.

The nomination materials should be emailed by the deadline to sigda.acm@gmail.com (Subject: ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award). Endorsement letters may be sent separately.

Award Committee:

Ron Duncan (Synopsys)
Tsung-Yi Ho (CUHK)
Ambar Sarkar (Nvidia)
Chengmo Yang (Delaware)
Dirk Ziegenbein (Bosch)

All standard conflict of interest regulations as stated in ACM policy will be applied. Any awards committee members will recuse themselves from consideration of any candidates where a conflict of interest may exist.

Past Awardees

2024	Bonan Yan	Peking University
2023	Tsung-Wei Huang	University of Utah
2022	Yingyan (Celine) Lin	Rice University
2021	Zheng Zhang	UC Santa Barbara
2020	Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardon	University of Utah
2019	Jeyavijayan (JV) Rajendran	Texas A&M University
2018	Shimeng Yu	Arizona State University
2017	Yier Jin	University of Florida
2016	Swaroop Ghosh	University of South Florida
2015	Muhammad Shafique	Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
2014	Yiran Chen	University of Pittsburgh
2013	Shobha Vasudevan	UIUC
2012	David Atienza	EPFL, Switzerland
2011	Farinaz Koushanfar	Rice University
2010	Puneet Gupta	UCLA
	Deming Chen	UIUC
2009	Yu Cao	Arizona State University
2008	Subhasish Mitra	Stanford University
2007	Michael Orshansky	University of Texas, Austin
2006	David Pan	University of Texas, Austin
2004	Kaustav Banerjee	University of California, Santa Barbara
	Igor Markov	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
2003	Dennis Sylvester	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
2002	Charlie Chung-Ping Chen	Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
2000	Vijay Narayanan	Penn State University

OPDA

Tuesday, March 18, 2025 Yibo Lin Awards

2025 ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation

Call for Nominations

Design automation has gained widespread acceptance by the VLSI circuits and systems design community. Advancement in computer-aided design (CAD) methodologies, algorithms, and tools has become increasingly important to cope with the rapidly growing design complexity, higher performance and low-power requirements, and shorter time-to-market demands. To encourage innovative, ground-breaking research in the area of electronic design automation, the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) has established an ACM award to be given each year to an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation that makes the most substantial contribution to the theory and/or application in the field of electronic design automation.

The award consists of a plaque and an honorarium of USD $1,000. The 2025 Award will be presented at ICCAD 2025 in November 2025. The award is selected by a committee of experts from academia and industry in the field and appointed by ACM in consultation with the SIGDA Chair.

Deadline for the 2025 Award: 30 April 2025

Eligibility and nomination requirements: For the 2025 Award, the nominated dissertation should date between 1 July 2023 and 31 December 2024. Each nomination package should consist of:

The PDF file of the Ph.D. dissertation in the English language;
A statement (up to two pages) from the nominee explaining the significance and major contributions of the work;
A nomination letter from the nominee’s advisor or department chair or dean of the school endorsing the application;
Optionally, up to three letters of recommendation from experts in the field.

The nomination materials should be emailed to sigda.acm@gmail.com (Subject: ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in EDA). Recommendation letters may be sent separately.

Award Committee:

Ismail Bustany (AMD)

Mustafa Badaroglu (QualComm)

Jintong Hu (Pittsburg)

Sharad Malik (Princeton)

Mark Ren (Nvidia)

Aviral Shrivastava (ASU)

Linghao Song (Yale)

Peh Li Shiuan (NUS)

Natarajan Viswanathan (Cadence)

Robert Wille (TUM)

All standard conflict of interest regulations as stated in ACM policy will be applied. Any award committee members will recuse themselves from consideration of any candidates where a conflict of interest may exist.

Past Awardees

2024	Lukas Burgholzer, for the dissertation “Design Automation Tools and Software for Quantum Computing”, Johannes Kepler University Linz. Advisors: Robert Wille and Jens Eisert.
2023	Zhiyao Xie, for the dissertation “Intelligent Circuit Design and Implementation with Machine Learning”, Duke University, Advisors: Yiran Chen and Hai Li
2022	Ganapati Bhat, for the dissertation “Design, Optimization, and Applications of Wearable IoT Devices”, Arizona State University, Advisor: Umit Y. Ogras
2021	Ahmedullah Aziz, for the dissertation “Device-Circuit Co-Design Employing Phase Transition Materials for Low power Electronics”, Purdue University, Advisor: Sumeet Gupta.
2020	Gengjie Chen, for the dissertation “VLSI Routing: Seeing Nano Tree in Giga Forest,” The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Advisor: Evangeline Young.
2019	Tsung-Wei Huang, for the dissertation “Distributed Timing Analysis“, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Advisor: Martin D. F. Wong.
2018	Xiaoqing Xu, for the dissertation “Standard Cell Optimization and Physical Design in Advanced Technology Nodes,” University of Texas at Austin. Advisor: David Z. Pan.
	Pramod Subramanyan, for the dissertation “Deriving Abstractions to Address Hardware Platform Security Challenges,” Princeton University. Advisor: Sharad Malik.
2017	Jeyavijayan Rajendran, for the dissertation “Trustworthy Integrated Circuit Design,” New York University. Advisor: Ramesh Karri.
2016	Zheng Zhang, for the dissertation “Uncertainty Quantification for Integrated Circuits and Microelectromechanical Systems,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Advisor: Luca Daniel.
2015	Wenchao Li, for the dissertation “Specification Mining: New Formalisms, Algorithms and Applications,” University of California at Berkeley. Advisor: Sanjit Seshia.
2014	Wangyang Zhang, for the dissertation “IC Spatial Variation Modeling: Algorithms and Applicaitons,” Carnegie Mellon University. Advisors: Xin Li and Rob Rutenbar
2013	Duo Ding, for the dissertation “CAD for Nanolithography and Nanophotonics,” University of Texas at Austin. Advisor: David Z. Pan
	Guojie Luo, for the dissertation “Placement and Design Planning for 3D integrated Circuits,” UCLA. Advisor: Jason Cong
2012	Tan Yan, for the dissertation “Algorithmic Studies on PCB Routing,” defended with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
2011	Nishant Patil, for the dissertation “Design and Fabrication of Imperfection-Immune Carbon Nanotube Digital VLSI Circuits,” Stanford University.
2010	Himanshu Jain, for the dissertation “Verification using Satisfiability Checking, Predicate Abstraction, and Craig Interpolation,” Carnegie Mellon University.
2009	Kai-Hui Chang, for the dissertation “Functional Design Error Diagnosis, Correction and Layout Repair of Digital Circuits”, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
2008	(No award is given this year)
2007	(No award is given this year)
2006	Haifeng Qian of University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, for the thesis entitled “Stochastic and Hybrid Linear Equation Solvers and their Applications in VLSI Design Automation”.
2005	Shuvendu Lahiri of Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, for a thesis entitled “Unbounded System Verification using Decision Procedure and Predicate Abstraction”
2004	Chao Wang of University of Colorado at Boulder, Department of Electrical Engineering, for a thesis entitled “Abstraction Refinement for Large Scale Model Checking”
2003	Luca Daniel of University of California, Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for a thesis entitled “Simulation and modeling techniques for signal integrity and electromagnetic interference on high frequency electronic systems”
	Lintao Zhang of Princeton University Department of Electrical Engineering for a thesis entitled “Searching for truth: techniques for satisfiability of Boolean formulas.”
2002	(No award is given this year)
2001	Darko Kirovski from University of California, Los Angeles Department of Computer Science for a thesis entitled “Constraint Manipulation Techniques for Synthesis and Verification of Embedded Systems.” The runner-up who received an honorable mention in that years ceremony was Michael Beattie of Carnegie Mellon University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for a thesis entitled “Efficient Electromagnetic Modeling for Giga-scale IC Interconnect.”
2000	Robert Brent Jones of Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering for a thesis entitled “Applications of Symbolic Simulation To the Formal Verification of Microprocessors.”

Newton

Sunday, March 09, 2025 Yibo Lin Awards

ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation 2025

Call for Nominations

Description

To honor a person or persons for an outstanding technical contribution within the scope of electronic design automation, as evidenced by a paper published at least ten years before the presentation of the award (before July 2015).

Prize

USD 1500 to be shared amongst the authors and a plaque for each author.

Funding

Funded by the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation and ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation.

Presentation

Presented annually at the Design Automation Conference.

Historical Background

A. Richard Newton, one of the foremost pioneers and leaders of the EDA field, passed away on 2 January 2007, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 55.

A. Richard Newton was professor and dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Newton was educated at the University of Melbourne and received his bachelor’s degree in 1973 and his master’s degree in 1975. In the early 1970s he began to work on SPICE, a simulation program initially developed by Larry Nagel and Donald Pederson to analyze and design complex electronic circuitry with speed and accuracy. In 1978, Newton earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley.

For his research and entrepreneurial contributions to the electronic design automation industry, he was awarded the 2003 Phil Kaufman Award. In 2004, he was named a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and in 2006, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Basis for Judging

The prime consideration will be the impact on technology, industry, and education, and on working designers and engineers in the field of EDA. Such impact might include a research result that inspires much innovative thinking, or that has been put into wide use in practice.

Eligibility

The paper must have passed through a peer-review process before publication, be an archived conference or journal publication available from or published by either ACM or IEEE, and be a seminal paper where an original idea was first described. Follow-up papers and extended descriptions of the work may be cited in the nomination, but the award is given for the initial original contribution.

Selection Committee

Chair: Wanli Chang

Vice-Chair: Deming Chen

Members to be announced

Nomination Deadline

21 March 2025

Nomination Package

Please send a one-page nomination letter explaining the impact of the nominated paper, evidence of the impact, biography of the nominator, at most three endorsements, and the nominated paper itself, all in one PDF file, to sigda.acm@gmail.com (Subject: 2025 A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation).

Past Awardees

2024: Mircea Stan and Wayne Burleson, “Bus-Invert Coding for Low-Power I/O”, IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 49-58, March 1995.
2023: Moshe Vardi and Pierre Wolper for their research work “An Automata-Theoretic Approach to Automatic Program Verification”, published in the proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, 1986.
2022: Ricardo Telichevesky, Kenneth S. Kundert, and Jacob K. White, “Efficient Steady-State Analysis based on Matrix-Free Krylov-Subspace Methods”, In Proc. of the 32nd Design Automation Conference, 1995.
2021: John A. Waicukauski, Eric Lindbloom, Barry K. Rosen, and Vijay S. Iyengar, “Transition Fault Simulation,” IEEE Design & Test of Computers, Vol. 4, no. 2, April 1987
2020: Luca Benini and Giovanni De Micheli, “Networks on Chips: A New SoC Paradigm,” IEEE Computer, pp. 70-78, January 2002.
2019: E. B. Eichelberger and T. W. Williams, “A Logic Design Structure for LSI Testability,” In Proc. of the 14th Design Automation Conference, 1977.
2018: Hans Eisenmann and Frank M. Johannes, “Generic Global Placement and Floorplanning,” In Proc. of the 35th Design Automation Conference, 1998.
2017: Matthew W. Moskewicz, Conor F. Madigan, Ying Zhao, Lintao Zhang, and Sharad Malik, “Chaff: Engineering an Efficient SAT Solver,” In Proc. of the 38st Design Automation Conference, 2001.
2016: Chandu Visweswariah, Kaushik Ravindran, Kerim Kalafala, Steven G. Walker, Sambasivan Narayan, “First-Order Incremental Block-Based Statistical Timing Analysis,” In Proc. of the 41st Design Automation Conference, 2004.
2015: Blaise Gassend, Dwaine Clarke, Marten van Dijk, and Srinivas Devadas, “Silicon Physical Random Functions,” In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2002.
2014: Subhasish Mitra and Kee Sup Kim, “X-compact: an efficient response compaction technique for test cost reduction,” IEEE International Test Conference, 2002.
2013: Keith Nabors and Jacob White, “FastCap: A multipole accelerated 3-D capacitance extraction program,” IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Vol. 10, Issue 11 (1991): 1447-1459.
2012: Altan Odabasioglu, Mustafa Celik, Larry Pileggi, “PRIMA: Passive Reduced-Order Interconnect Macromodeling Algorithm,” IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Aug., 1998.
2011: Jason Cong, Eugene Ding, “FlowMap: An Optimal Technology Mapping Algorithm for Delay Optimization in Lookup-Table Based FPGA Designs,” IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Jan., 1994.
2010: Randal Bryant, “Graph-based algorithms for Boolean function manipulation” IEEE Transactions on Computers, Aug., 1986.
2009: Robert K. Brayton, Richard Rudell, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Albert R. Wang, “MIS: A Multiple-Level Logic Optimizations System,” IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Nov., 1997.

Service

Sunday, November 05, 2023 Yibo Lin Awards

Service Awards

SIGDA has restructured its service awards, and will be giving two annual service awards.

Distinguished Service Award: The SIGDA Distinguished Service Award is given to individuals who have dedicated many years of their career in extraordinary services to promoting, leading, or creating ACM/SIGDA programs or events.
Meritorious Service Award: The SIGDA Meritorious Service Award is given to individuals who have performed professional services above and beyond traditional service to promoting, leading, or creating ACM/SIGDA programs or events.

At any given year, the number of Distinguished Service Award will be up to 2, and the number of Meritorious Service Award will be up to 4.

Nominations should consist of:

Award type being nominated.
Name, address, phone number and email of person making the nomination.
Name, affiliation, address, email, and telephone number of the nominee for whom the award is recommended.
A statement (between 200 and 500 words long) explaining why the nominee deserves the award. Note that the award is given for service that goes above and beyond traditional services.
Up to 2 additional letters of support. Include the name, affiliation, email address, and telephone number of the letter writer(s). Supporters of multiple candidates are strongly encouraged to compare the candidates in their letters.

Note that the nominator and reference shall come from active SIGDA volunteers. Deadline of the nomination every year: March 15 (Except 2019, May 5).

Please send all your nomination materials as one pdf file to SIGDA-Award@acm.org before the deadline.

Distinguished Service Awards

2023	Tulika Mitra, National University of Singapore “For her leadership in major SIGDA conferences such asgeneral chair for ICCAD and ESWEEK“.
	Patrick Groeneveld, Stanford University “For his multi-year significant contribution to the EDA community, such as DAC finance chair among many other“.
2022	Vijay Narayanan, The Pennsylvania State University “For Extraordinary Dedication and Leadership to SIGDA“.
	Harry Foster, Siemens EDA “For Extraordinary Dedication and Persistence in Leading DAC during Pandemic“.
2021	Deming Chen, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign “For distinguished contributions to the design automation and reconfigurable computing communities“.
	Evangeline F. Y. Young, Chinese University of Hong Kong “For outstanding leadership in promoting diversity in the ACM/SIGDA community“.
2020	Sri Parameswaran, University of New South Wales “For leadership and distinguished service to the EDA community“.
2019	Naehyuck Chang, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology “For many years of impactful service to ACM/SIGDA in various leadership positions“.
	Sudeep Pasricha, Colorado State University “For a decade of outstanding service to ACM/SIGDA in various volunteer positions“
2018	Chuck Alpert, Cadence Design Systems “For significant contributions to DAC”.
	Jörg Henkel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology “For leading SIGDA efforts in Europe and DATE”.
	Michael ‘Mac’ McNamara, Adapt-IP “For sustained contributions to the design automation community and DAC”.
	Michelle Clancy, Cayenne Communication “For sustained contributions to the community, especially DAC”.
2016	Steven Levitan “In recognition of a lifetime of devoted service to ACM SIGDA and the Electronic Design Automation community.”
2015	Tatsuo Ohtsuki, Waseda University Hiroto Yasuura, Kyushu University Hidetoshi Onodera, Kyoto University “For their distinguished contributions to the Asia and South Pacific Design automation Conference (ASPDAC) as well as their many years of dedicated service on the conference’s steering committee”
	Massoud Pedram, University of Southern California “For his many years of service as Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES)”
2014	Peter Marwedel, Technical University of Dortmund “For his muiltiple years of service starting and maintaining the DATE PhD Forum”
2012	Joe Zamreno, Iowa State University
	Baris Taskin, Drexel University
2011	Peter Feldman, IBM
	Radu Marculescu, CMU
	Qinru Qiu, Syracuse University
	Martin Wong, UIUC
	Qing Wu, Air Force Rome Labs
2010	Alex K. Jones “For dedicated service to ACM/SIGDA and the Design Automation Conference as director of the University Booth”
	Matt Guthaus “For dedicated service as director of SIGDA CADathlon at ICCAD program and Editor-in-Chief of the SIGDA E-Newsletter”
	Diana Marculescu “For dedicated service as SIGDA Chair, and contributions to SIGDA, DAC and the EDA Profession”
2009	Nikil Dutt “For contributions to ACM’s Special Interest Group on Design Automation during the past fifteen years as a SIGDA officer, coordinator of the University Booth in its early years, and most recently, as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems”
2008	SungKyu Lim “For his contributions to the DAC University Booth.”
2007	Richard Goering “For his contributions as EE Times Editorial Director for Design Automation for more than two decades”
	Gary Smith “For his contributions as Chief EDA Analyst at Gartner Dataquest for almost two decades.”
	Daniel Gajski Mary Jane Irwin Donald E. Thomas Chuck Shaw “For outstanding contributions to the creation of the SIGDA/DAC University Booth, on the occasion of its 20th edition.”
	Soha Hassoun Steven P. Levitan “For outstanding contributions to the creation of the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC on the occasion of its 10th edition.”
	Richard Auletta “For over a decade of service to SIGDA as University Booth Coordinator, Secretary/Treasurer, and Executive Committee Member-at-Large.”
2006	Robert Walker “For dedicated service as SIGDA Chair (2001 – 2005), and over a decade of service to SIGDA, DAC and the EDA profession.”
2005	Mary Jane Irwin “For dedicated service as Editor in Chief of ACM Journal, TODAES (1998 – 2004), and many years of service to SIGDA, DAC, and the EDA profession.”
2004	James P. Cohoon “For exemplary service to SIGDA, to ACM, to DAC, and to the EDA profession as a whole”
2003	James Plusquellic “For exemplary service to ACM/SIGDA and the Design Automation Conference as director of the University Booth program”
2002	Steven P. Levitan “For over a decade of service to ACM/SIGDA and the EDA industry — as DAC University Booth Coordinator, Student Design Contest organizer, founder and promoter of SIGDA’s web server, and most recently, Chair of ACM/SIGDA from 1997 to 2001.”
	Cheng-Kok Koh “For exemplary service to ACM/SIGDA and the EDA industry — as Co-director of SIGDA’s CDROM Project, as SIGDA’s Travel Grants Coordinator, and as Editor of the SIGDA Newsletter.”
2001	Robert Grafton “For contributions to the EDA profession through his many years as the Program Director of NSF’s Design, Tools, and Test Program of the computer, Information Sciences & Engineering Directorate. In this position, he provided supervision, mentorship, and guidance to several generation of EDA tool designers and builders funded by grants from the National Science Foundation.”
2000	Massoud Pedram “For his contributions in developing the SIGDA Multimedia Series and organizing the Young Student Support Program”
	Soha Hassoun “For developing the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum”
1999	C.L. (Dave) Liu “For his work in founding our flagship journal ACM/TODAES”

Meritorious Service Awards

2023	Robert Wille, Technical University of Munich “For his leading positions in major ACM SIGDA conferences, including Executive Committee of DATE, ICCAD and Chair of the PhD Forum at DAC and DATE“.
	Lei Jiang, Indiana University Bloomington “For his leadership and contribution to SIGDA student research forums (SRFs) at ASP-DAC“.
	Hui-Ru Jiang, National Taiwan University “For her continuous contribution to SIGDA PhD Forum at DAC and many other events“.
	Jeyavijayan (JV) Rajendran, Texas A&M University “For his leadership in co-founding and organizing Hack@DAC, the largest hardware security competition in the world“.
2022	Jeff Goeders, Brigham Young University “For Chairing System Design Contest @ DAC for the Past 3 Years“.
	Cheng Zhuo, Zhejiang University “For the Leading Efforts to the Success of SRC@ICCAD and SDC@DAC as Chairs for the past5 years, and the Sustained Contributions to the EDA Community in China“.
	Tsung-Wei Huang, University of Utah “For Chairing CADathlon and CAD Contests at ICCAD for Three Years. These Activities Have Engaged Hundreds of Students into CAD Research“.
	Yiyu Shi, University of Notre Dame “For Outstanding Services in Leading SIGDA Educational Efforts“.
2021	Bei Yu, Chinese University of Hong Kong “For service as SIGDA Web Chair from 2016 to 2021, SIGDA Student Research Competition Chair in 2018 and 2019, and other SIGDA activities“.

2020	Aida Todri-Sanial, LIRMM/University of Montpellier “For service as Co-Editor-in-Chief of SIGDA e-Newsletter from 2016 to 2019 and other SIGDA activities“.
	Yu Wang, Tsinghua University “For service as Co-Editor-in-Chief of SIGDA e-Newsletter from 2017 to 2019 and other SIGDA activities”.
2019	Yinhe Han, Chinese Academy of Sciences “For outstanding effort in promoting EDA and SIGDA events in China“
	Jingtong Hu, University of Pittsburgh “For contribution to multiple SIGDA education and outreach activities“
	Xiaowei Xu, University of Notre Dame “For contribution to the 2018 System Design Contest at ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference“
2015	Laleh Behjat, University of Calgary “For service as chair of the SIGDA PhD forum at DAC”
	Soonhoi Ha, Seoul National University Jeonghee Shin, Apple “For their service as co-chairs of the University Booth at DAC”
1998	Jason Cong Bryan Preas Kathy Preas Chong-Chian Koh Cheng-Kok Koh “For contributions in producing SIGDA CD ROM’s – Archiving the knowledge of the Design Automation Community”
1997	Robert Walker “For his hard work as Secretary/Treasurer and University Booth Coordinator”
1996	Debbie Hall “For serving as ACM Program Director for SIGDA for the past 6 years”

Following are some awards no longer being given:

Technical Leadership Awards

2013	Jarrod Roy Sudeep Pasricha Sudarshan Banerjee Srinivas Katkoori “for running CADathlon”
2012	Cheng Zhuo Steve Burns Amin Chirayu Andrey Ayupov Gustavo Wilke Mustafa Ozdal
2011	Raju Balasuramanian Zhuo Li Frank Liu Natarajan Viswanathan
2010	Cliff Sze “For contributions to the ISPD Physical Design contest, and promoting research in physical design.”
2008	Hai Zhou “For contributions to the SIGDA E-Newsletter (2005-2008)”
	Jing Yang “For contributions to the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC (2004-2008)”
2007	Geert Janssen “For contributions to the SIGDA CADathlon”
	Tony Givargis “For contributions to the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC (2005-2007)”
	Gi-Joon Nam “For contributions to the Physical Design Contest at ISPD (2005-2007)”
2006	Kartik Mohanram “For contributions to the SIGDA CADathlon at ICCAD (2004-2005)”
	Ray Hoare “For contributions to the SIGDA University Booth at DAC (2004-2006)”
	Radu Marculescu “For contributions to the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC (2004-2006)”
	Frank Liu “For contributions to the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC (2005-2006)”
2005	Florian Krohm “For contributions to the SIGDA CADathlon at ICCAD”
	R. Iris Bahar Igor Markov “For contributions to the SIGDA E-Newsletter”
2004	Robert Jones “For contributions to the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC”
2003	Diana Marculescu “For contributions to the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC”
2002	Geert Janssen “For contributions to the SIGDA CADathlon at ICCAD”
	Pai Chou Abe Elfadel Olivier Coudert Soha Hassoun “For contributions to the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC”

1996 SIGDA Lifetime Achievement Award

Paul Weil
“For contributions to SIGDA for 13 years, most recently being in charge of Workshops.”

1996 SIGDA Leadership Award

Steve Levitan
“For Newsletter and Electronic Publishing”

1995 SIGDA Outstanding Leadership Award

Charlotte Acken
“In recognition of her efforts in managing the high school scholarship program”

1994 SIGDA Outstanding Leadership Award

Pat Hefferan
“As Editor of the SIGDA Newsletter”

Pioneer

Wednesday, September 13, 2023 Yibo Lin Awards

SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award

Presented by the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation.

Description: To honor a person for lifetime, outstanding contributions within the scope of electronic design automation, as evidenced by ideas pioneered in publications, industrial products, or other relevant contributions. The award is based on the impact of the contributions throughout the nominee’s lifetime.

Background: The ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation sponsors or co-sponsors the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems Best Paper Award, the William McCalla Award for best paper at the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, and the ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact in Electronic Design Automation Award which is given to authors of a publication authored at least ten years earlier and that has had an outstanding contribution to the field of EDA. In addition, SIGDA sponsors the ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation which is given each year to a graduating Ph.D. student in recognition of his/her thesis contributions to advancement in the EDA field. The Pioneering Achievement Award complements these awards and is intended for contributors whose impact is typically recognized over a lifetime of outstanding achievements.

Eligibility: Open to researchers in the field of electronic design automation who have had outstanding contributions in the field during their lifetime. Current members of the Board of the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation, or members of the Award Selection Committee are ineligible for the award. The awardee is invited to give a lecture at a SIGDA-sponsored event.

Award Items: A plaque for the awardee, a citation, and $1000 honorarium. The honorarium will be funded by the SIGDA annual budget.

Nominee Solicitation: The call for nominees will be published by email to members of SIGDA, on the web site of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Design Automation, and in the SIGDA newsletter. The nomination should be proposed by someone other than the nominee. The nomination materials should be emailed to SIGDA-Award@acm.org (Subject: ACM/SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award). Nominations for the award should include:

A nomination letter that gives: a 100-word description of the nominee’s contribution and its impact; a 750-word detailed description of up to 10 of the nominee’s major products (papers, patents, software, etc.), the contributions embodied in those products, and their impact; a list of at most 10 citations to the major products discussed in the description.
Three letters of recommendation (not including the nominator or nominee).
Contact information of the nominator.

In addition to the evidence of impact, the nomination form will include biographical information (including education and employment), professional activities, publications, and recognition. Three endorsements attesting to the impact of the work may be included.

Award Committee: Selection will be made by the ACM Special Interest Group in Design Automation Executive Committee based on the recommendation of a Pioneer Award committee. The Committee will meet to review nominations, review the recommendations of the Pioneer Award Committee, and make a selection. After selection, the committee will contact the recipient to ensure that the award will be accepted and he or she will be able to deliver the talk at the SIGDA Annual Member Meeting and Dinner at ICCAD.

All standard conflict of interest regulations as stated in ACM policy will be applied (see https://awards.acm.org/conflict-of-interest). Any awards committee members will recuse themselves from consideration of any candidates where a conflict of interest may exist.

Schedule: The call for nominees will be published annually. The nomination deadline is Aug 31st. The award will be announced at one or more subsequent SIGDA events and the awardee will be invited to give a talk on his/her work at the SIGDA Annual Member Meeting and Dinner at ICCAD.

Selection/Basis for Judging: This award honors an individual who has made an outstanding technical contribution in the scope of electronic design automation throughout his or her lifetime. The award is based on the impact of the contributions as indicated above. Nominees from universities, industry, and government worldwide will be considered and encouraged. The award is not a best paper or initial original contribution award. Instead, it is intended for lifetime, outstanding contributions within the scope of electronic design automation, throughout the nominee’s lifetime.

Presentation: The award will be presented annually at the SIGDA Annual Member Meeting and Dinner at ICCAD.

Publicity: In ACM/SIGDA publications and at conferences sponsored by ACM/SIGDA.

Programs

ACM SIGDA Speaker Travel Grant Program

Friday, March 03, 2023 Yibo Lin Programs

The SIGDA Speaker Series Travel Grant actively supports the travels of the speakers who are invited to give lectures or talks in local events, universities, and companies, so as to disseminate the values and impact of SIGDA. These speakers can be from either academia or company and are considered as good lectures that can help reach out to the audiences in the broad field of design automation. Once the application is approved, SIGDA will issue partial grants to cover the speaker’s travel expenses, including travel and subsistence costs.

This grant is to help on promoting the EDA community and activities all over the world. It will provide travel support averaging $1,000 (USD) for approximately 6 eligible speakers per year to defray their costs of giving lectures or talks in local events, universities, and companies. Priority will be given to the applicants from the local sections of SIGDA with the speakers presenting in the events supported by the local sections of SIGDA. In addition, local EDA communities or individuals, rather than local sections of SIGDA, are also encouraged to apply for this grant. For the application or additional information, please contact SIGDA by sending an email exclusively to the Technical Activity Chair (https://www.sigda.org/about-us/officers/).

Review Process

The review committee will be formed by the current Technical Activity Chair and Education Chair of SIGDA. The reviews will be reported and discussed in SIGDA’s executive committee meeting. After the discussion, the executing committee members will vote to grant or not grant the submitted applications.

Selection Criteria

The review takes the applicants/events and speakers in considerations.

Preference is given to the local sections of SIGDA for the speakers invited to the events, universities, and companies supported by the local sections of SIGDA. In addition, the applicants from local EDA communities or individuals are also considered.
The invited speaker should be a good lecture or researcher from either academia or industry, and has a good track record in the broad field of design automation.

Post Applications – Report and Reimbursement

For the speaker giving a talk in an ACM event, SIGDA can support the travel grant and process reimbursements to the speaker directly. At the end of the event, the speaker needs to complete the ACM reimbursement form and send it to SIGDA or ACM Representative along with copies of the receipts. The speakers will also need to abide by the reimbursement policies/standards found here: https://www.acm.org/special-interest-groups/volunteer-resources/conference-planning/conference-finances#speaker
For the speaker giving a talk in a non-ACM event, SIGDA will provide the lump sum payment to the legal and financial sponsoring organization, which would offer the fund as the travel grants and process reimbursements. Meanwhile, the sponsoring organization needs to indicate on the event’s promotional materials that travel grants are being supported by SIGDA. At the end of the event, the sponsoring organization needs to provide (1) a one-page final report to SIGDA reflecting the success of their goals against the funds provided and indicating how the funds were spent, (2) an invoice for the approved amount, and (3) tax form. Note that there is no specific format for the final report.

Application Form

SIGDA+Speaker+Travel+Grant_v4 Download

Sponsor

Synopsys

Info for Organizers of SIGDA Sponsored Events

About ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA)

SIGDA is committed to advancing the skills and knowledge of electronic design automation professionals and students throughout the world. We do so in a variety of ways: sponsoring and organizing international workshops, symposia and conferences; leading the way in capturing archival electronic design automation publications; providing travel grants to sponsored workshops, symposia and conferences; pioneering the maintenance and distribution of electronic design automation benchmarks; hosting university and government researchers for software demonstrations at the University Research Demonstration at DAC; publishing the SIGDA Newsletter; maintaining a World Wide Web access site on Internet; creating the webinar series SIGDA LIVE, and managing the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems. Highlights of our recent activities include:

SIGDA Live is a series of webinars, launched monthly or bi-monthly, on topics (either technical or non-technical) of general interest to the SIGDA community. The talks in general fall on the last Wednesday of a month, and take about 45 minutes plus 15 minutes Q&A. Speaker and topic nominations are welcome and should be sent to sigdalive@gmail.com. All past talks are archived through our Youtube channel.
The ACM Transactions on the Design Automation of Electronic Systems: The journal provides comprehensive coverage of innovative research and work concerning the creation and evaluation of VLSI electronic systems. The journal emphasizes a computer science and engineering orientation. Topics include system design, high-level synthesis, logic synthesis, physical layout, design verification, system reliability, and high-performance circuits. The journal is actively seeking research papers, tutorial and survey papers, and short technical notes. The journal is distributed in hard-copy and electronic formats. SIGDA members receive a significantly subsidized subscription rate.
SIGDA sponsors or is in cooperation with major design automation conferences and workshops. We average more than two such events per month. A SIGDA member receives a significantly reduced registration rate for these meetings.

2022: Ron Rohrer, SMU, CMU	For the introduction and evolution of simulation and analysis techniques that have supported the design and test of integrated circuits and systems for more than half a century.
2021: Prof. Rob Rutenbar, PITT	For his pioneering work and extraordinary leadership in analog design automation and general EDA education.
2020: Prof. Jacob A. Abraham, UT Austin	For pioneering and fundamental contributions to manufacturing testing and fault-tolerant operation of computing systems.
2019: Prof. Giovanni De Micheli, EPFL	For pioneering and fundamental contributions to synthesis and optimization of integrated circuits and networks-on-chip.
2018: Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli, UC Berkeley	For pioneering and fundamental contributions to design automation research and industry, in system-level design, embedded systems, logic synthesis, physical design and circuit simulation.
2017: Prof. Mary Jane Irwin, Pennsylvania State University	For contributions to VLSI architectures, electronic design automation and community membership.
2016: Prof. Chung Laung (Dave) Liu, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan (emeritus)	For the fundamental and seminal contributions to physical design and embedded systems.
2014: Prof. John P. Hayes, University of Michigan
2013: Prof. Donald E. Thomas, Carnegie Mellon University	For his pioneering work in making the Verilog Hardware Description Language more accessible for the design automation community and allowing for faster and easier pathways to simulation, high-level synthesis, and co-design of hardware-software systems.
2012: Dr. Louise Trevillyan, IBM	Recognizing her almost-40-year career in EDA and her groundbreaking research contributions in logic and physical synthesis, design verification, high-level synthesis, processor performance analysis, and compiler technology.
2011: Prof. Robert K. Brayton, UC Berkeley	For outstanding contributions to the field of Computer Aided Design of integrated systems over the last several decades.
2010: Prof. Scott Kirkpatrick, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem	On Solving Hard Problems by Analogy Automated electronic design is not the only field in which surprising analogies from other fields of science have been used to deal with the challenges of very large problem sizes, requiring optimization across multiple scales, with constraints which eliminate any elegant solutions. Similar opportunities arise, for example, in logistics, in scheduling, in portfolio optimization and other classic problems. The common ingredient in all of these is that the problems are fundamentally frustrated, in that conflicting objectives must be traded off at all scales. This, plus the irregular structure in such real world problems eliminates any easy routes to the best solutions. Of course, in engineering, the real objective is not a global optimum, but a solution that is “good enough” and can be obtained “soon enough” to be useful. The model in materials science that gave rise by analogy to simulated annealing is the spin glass, which recently surfaced again in computer science as a vehicle whose inherent complexity might answer the long-vexing question of whether P can be proved not equal to NP.
2009: Prof. Martin Davis, NYU	For his fundamental contributions to algorithms for solving the Boolean Satisfiability problem, which heavily influenced modern tools for hardware and software verifciation, as well as logic circuit synthesis.
2008: Prof. Edward J. McCluskey, Stanford	For his outstanding contributions to the areas of CAD, test and reliable computing during the past half of century.
2007: Dr. Gene M. Amdahl, Amdahl Corporation	Award citation: For his outstanding contributions to the computing industry on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Amdahl’s Law. Video of Dr. Amdahl’s dinner talk and a panel debate are available on the ACM digital library.