A. Richard Newton Young Student Fellowship

In honor of the memory of Dr. A. Richard Newton, the A. Richard Newton Young Student Fellow program encourages students to join the electronic design automation field and/or consider graduate studies in this field. In each year, the program sponsors 60-70 students to participate various technical activities at the Design Automation Conference.
 
Each selected fellow will receive a full free DAC conference registration, including tutorials, along with a travel award that can cover travel, lodging, and incidentals. As a group, the awardee will participate in the following activities at DAC:

• Kickoff breakfast meeting on Sunday morning.
• Participate in the Design Automation Summer School on Sunday.
• Selected conference sessions, including sessions with Best Paper Award nominations
• Poster presentation introducing each Fellow (either current research, or relevant coursework/projects) during the DAC student event on Tuesday evening.
• Attendance at the Awards Session
• Attendance at the closing session during the Thursday evening reception.
• Use social media (tweets, facebook, linkedIn, etc.) to provide timely news, photos and feedback on events during DAC. Students are expected to blog at least twice daily.

 
More details about submission format and details: DAC website.

P.O. Pistilli Undergraduate Scholarship

Supported by the Design Automation Conference which ACM/SIGDA sponsors, the objective of the P. O. Pistilli Scholarship is to increase the pool of professionals in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from underrepresented groups (Women, African American, Hispanic, American Indian, and Disabled). Scholarships of $4000 per year, renewable for up to 5 years, are awarded annually to 2-7 high school seniors from the above mentioned under represented groups who have a 3.00 GPA or better (on a 4.00 scale), have demonstrated high achievement in math and science courses, have expressed a strong desire to pursue careers in electrical engineering, computer engineering, or computer science, and who have demonstrated substantial financial need. U.S. citizenship is not required, but applicants must be U.S. residents when they apply and must plan to attend an accredited US college or university.

2025 ACM SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award

Call for Nominations

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.

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 SIGDA, or members of the Award Selection Committee are ineligible for the award. The awardee is usually invited to give a lecture at ICCAD.

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 website of ACM SIGDA, and in the SIGDA newsletter. The nomination should be proposed by someone other than the nominee. The nomination materials should be emailed to sigda.acm@gmail.com (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.
• Up to three letters of recommendation (not including the nominator or nominee).
• Contact information of the nominator.

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

Award Committee:

Wanli Chang (Chair)

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli (UC Berkeley)

Giovanni De Micheli (EPFL)

John Hayes (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor)

Jiang Hu (TAMU)

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.

Schedule: The submission deadline for the 2025 Award is 31 July 2025.

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 is planned to be presented annually at DAC as well as the SIGDA Annual Member Meeting and Dinner at ICCAD.

2024: John Darringer, IBM
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.

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

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:

1. 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;
2. a copy of a current curriculum vitae;
3. 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

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.

SIGDA ACM Fellows