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.