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. In this competition, participants compete to identify the security vulnerabilities, implement the related exploits, propose mitigation techniques or patches, and report them. The participants are encouraged to use any tools and techniques with a focus on theory, tooling, and automation.

       The contest mimics real-world scenarios where security engineers have to find vulnerabilities in the given design. The vulnerabilities are diverse and range from data corruption to leaking sensitive information leading to compromise of the entire computing platform. The open-source SoC riddled with security vulnerabilities has been co-developed by Intel, the Technical University of Darmstadt, and Texas A&M University. HACK@DAC has been successfully running since 2018 with several hundred contestants from academia and industry.

       HACK@DAC is the first-of-its-kind security competition focusing on SoC Security first launched at the Design Automation Conference in 2018. Since then, it attracted massive interest and participations by teams across the globe and evolved into a franchise called HACK@EVENT with annual presence at top-tier industry and academic conferences.

       HACK@DAC 2023 consists of 2 phases, a Qualifying Round and a Live Round. The Qualifying Round was open to all participants and ended in mid-May. Top teams from the Qualifying Round were invited to participate in the Live Competition on July 9-10 at the Design Automation Conference (#DAC60) in San Francisco, CA. Teams had 48 hours to find and exploit as many security vulnerabilities in the “buggy SoC” provided by the competition organizers. Points were awarded to teams that correctly identified security vulnerabilities in the design. Bonus points were earned when teams demonstrated clever use of automation in vulnerability detection and/or exploitation. Teams with the highest scores win.

                     DAC Award Ceremony on July 13, 2023.

Not Your Typical Capture-the-Flag (CTF)

To deliver an immersive, hands-on pre-silicon hacking experience, we prepared a sophisticated “buggy SoC” that incorporated industry-scale security features along with common security vulnerabilities that were inspired by real-world product issues. In addition, we enabled each team with a set of powerful commercial-grade EDA tools in the cloud, while providing options for teams to deploy their own custom tools. Participants in all SoC hacking experience levels were covered.

Behind the Scenes

The HACK@DAC organizing team is made up of industry and academia experts. A big shout-out goes to the team for their flawless execution and outstanding collaboration, working tirelessly since the beginning of the year.

• Arun Kanuparthi and Hareesh Khattri from Intel Corporation
• Yann Antonioli, Jagminder Chugh and Shylaja Sen from Synopsys Inc
• Pouya Mahmoody, Mohamadreza Rostami, and Shaza Zeitouni from Technische Universität Darmstadt
• Rahul Kande and Venkatakrishnan Sutharsan from Texas A&M University

HACK@DAC 2023 Winners

1st: Team “Sycuricon”, Zhejiang University, China

• Advisor: Yajin Zhoud
• Members: Jinyan Xu, Yiyuan Liu, Xiaodi Zhao, Jiaxun Zhu

2nd: Team “Calgary ISH”, University of Calgary, Canada

• Advisor: Dr. Benjamin Tan
• Members: Joey Ah-kiow, Anudeep Dharavathu, Abdelrahman Elnaggar, Subroto Kumer Deb Nath

3rd: Team “Bitwise Bandits”, University of Florida, United States and Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

• Advisor: Dr. Swarup Bhunia
• Members: Sudipta Paria, Aritra Dasgupta, Rajat Sadhukhan, Arnab Bag

3rd: Team “NYU_bounty_hunters”, UNSW, Australia and New York University, United States

• Advisor: Dr. Hammond Pearce 
• Members:Prithwish Basu Roy, Meet Udeshi, Jason Blocklove, Animesh Basak Chowdhury

Congratulations to the winners of the 6th HACK@DAC Hardware Security Capture-the-Flag (CTF) Competition!

News: SIGDA Student Research Competition (SRC) Gold Medalists won ACM SRC Grand Finals

• Graduate: First Place

Jiaqi Gu, University of Texas at Austin

Research Advisors: David Z. Pan and Ray T. Chen

“Light in Artificial Intelligence: Efficient Neuromorphic Computing with Optical Neural Networks” (ICCAD 2020)

Deep neural networks have received an explosion of interest for their superior performance in various intelligent tasks and high impacts on our lives. The computing capacity is in an arms race with the rapidly escalating model size and data amount for intelligent information processing. Practical application scenarios, e.g., autonomous vehicles, data centers, and edge devices, have strict energy efficiency, latency, and bandwidth constraints, raising a surging need to develop more efficient computing solutions. However, as Moore’s law is winding down, it becomes increasingly challenging for conventional electrical processors to support such massively parallel and energy-hungry artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. .. [Read more]

• Undergraduate: Second Place

Chuangtao Chen, Zhejiang University

Research Advisor: Cheng Zhuo

“Optimally Approximated Floating-Point Multiplier” (ICCAD 2020)

At the edge, IoT devices are designed to consume the minimum resource to achieve the desired accuracy. However, the conventional processors, such as CPU or GPU, can only conduct all the computations with predetermined but sometimes unnecessary precisions, inevitably degrading their energy efficiency. When running data-intensive applications, due to the large range of input operands, most conventional processors heavily rely on floating-point units (FPUs). Recently, approximate computing has become a promising alternative to improve energy efficiency for IoT devices on the edge, especially when running inaccuracy-tolerable applications. For various data-intensive tasks on edge devices, multiplication is a common but the most energy consuming one among different floating-point operations. As a common arithmetic component that has been studied for decades [1]–[3], the past focus on the FP multiplier is accuracy and performance… [Read more]

ACM Student Research Competition at ICCAD 2020 (SRC@ICCAD’20)

DEADLINE: September 28, 2020 (extended)
Online Submission: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=srciccad2020
 
Sponsored by Microsoft Research, the ACM Student Research Competition is an internationally recognized venue enabling undergraduate and graduate students who are ACM members to:

• Experience the research world — for many undergraduates, this is a first!
• Share research results and exchange ideas with other students, judges, and conference attendees
• Rub shoulders with academic and industry luminaries
• Understand the practical applications of their research
• Perfect their communication skills
• Receive prizes and gain recognition from ACM and the greater computing community.

The ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM SIGDA) is organizing such an event in conjunction with the International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). Authors of accepted submissions will get ICCAD registration fee support from SIGDA. The event consists of several rounds, as described at http://src.acm.org/ and http://www.acm.org/student-research-competition, where you can also find more details on student eligibility and timeline.

Details on abstract submission:
Research projects from all areas of design automation are encouraged. The author submitting the abstract must still be a student at the time the abstract is due. Each submission should be made on the EasyChair submission site. Please include the author’s name, affiliation, and email address; research advisor’s name; ACM student member number; category (undergraduate or graduate); research title; and an extended abstract (maximum 2 pages or 800 words) containing the following sections:

• Problem and Motivation: This section should clearly state the problem being addressed and explain the reasons for seeking a solution to this problem.
• Background and Related Work: This section should describe the specialized (but pertinent) background necessary to appreciate the work. Include references to the literature where appropriate, and briefly explain where your work departs from that done by others. Reference lists do not count towards the limit on the length of the abstract.
• Approach and Uniqueness: This section should describe your approach in attacking the problem and should clearly state how your approach is novel.
• Results and Contributions: This section should clearly show how the results of your work contribute to computer science and should explain the significance of those results. Include a separate paragraph (maximum of 100 words) for possible publication in the conference proceedings that serves as a succinct description of the project.
• Single paper summaries (or just cut & paste versions of published papers) are inappropriate for the ACM SRC. Submissions should include at least one year worth of research contributions, but not subsuming an entire doctoral thesis load.

All accepted submissions will be invited to present their work to the community (and a jury) as part of the program for ICCAD 2020 (details on the presentations will follow after acceptance). Note that ICCAD will take place virtually (i.e., as an online event) from November 2 to November 4, 2020.

The ACM Student Research Competition allows both graduate and undergraduate students to discuss their research with student peers, as well as academic and industry researchers, in an informal setting, while enabling them to attend ICCAD and compete with other ACM SRC winners from other computing areas in the ACM Grand Finals.

Online Submission – EasyChair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=srciccad2020 
Important dates:

• Abstract submission deadline: September 28, 2020 (extended)
• Acceptance notification: October 12, 2020
• Poster session: November 02, 2020
• Award winners announced at ICCAD
• Grand Finals winners honored at ACM Awards Banquet: June 2021 (Estimated)

Organizers:

Robert Wille (Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria), robert.wille@jku.at

Meng Li (Facebook, USA), meng.li@fb.com

ACM Student Research Competition at ICCAD 2019 (SRC@ICCAD’19)

Winners in the graduate category

Winners in the undergraduate category

DEADLINE: August 17, 2019
Online Submission: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=srciccad2019
 
Sponsored by Microsoft Research, the ACM Student Research Competition is an internationally recognized venue enabling undergraduate and graduate students who are ACM members to:

• Experience the research world — for many undergraduates, this is a first!
• Share research results and exchange ideas with other students, judges, and conference attendees
• Rub shoulders with academic and industry luminaries
• Understand the practical applications of their research
• Perfect their communication skills
• Receive prizes and gain recognition from ACM and the greater computing community.

The ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM SIGDA) is organizing such an event in conjunction with the International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). Authors of accepted submissions will get travel grants up to $500 from ACM/Microsoft and ICCAD registration fee support from SIGDA. The event consists of several rounds, as described at http://src.acm.org/ and http://www.acm.org/student-research-competition, where you can also find more details on student eligibility and timeline.
 

At SRC@ICCAD’18, the first-place winners in the graduate category, Gengjie Chen (Chinese University of Hong Kong), and the first-place winner in the undergraduate category, Zhuangzhuang Zhou (Shanghai Jiaotong Univeristy), both won the First Place in the 2019 ACM SRC Grand Finals! (https://www.acm.org/media-center/2019/may/src-2019-grand-finals)

The first-place winner in the graduate category at SRC@ICCAD’17, Meng Li (University of Texas at Austin), also won the First Place in the 2018 ACM SRC Grand Finals! (https://www.acm.org/media-center/2018/june/src-2018-grand-finals)
 
The first-place winner in the undergraduate category at SRC@ICCAD’16, Jennifer Vaccaro (Olin College of Engineering), also won the Second Place in the 2017 ACM SRC Grand Finals: http://www.acm.org/media-center/2017/june/src-2017-grand-finals.

Details on abstract submission:
Research projects from all areas of design automation are encouraged. The author submitting the abstract must still be a student at the time the abstract is due. Each submission should be made on the EasyChair submission site. Please include the author’s name, affiliation, postal address, and email address; research advisor’s name; ACM student member number; category (undergraduate or graduate); research title; and an extended abstract (maximum 2 pages or 800 words) containing the following sections:

• Problem and Motivation: This section should clearly state the problem being addressed and explain the reasons for seeking a solution to this problem.
• Background and Related Work: This section should describe the specialized (but pertinent) background necessary to appreciate the work. Include references to the literature where appropriate, and briefly explain where your work departs from that done by others. Reference lists do not count towards the limit on the length of the abstract.
• Approach and Uniqueness: This section should describe your approach in attacking the problem and should clearly state how your approach is novel.
• Results and Contributions: This section should clearly show how the results of your work contribute to computer science and should explain the significance of those results. Include a separate paragraph (maximum of 100 words) for possible publication in the conference proceedings that serves as a succinct description of the project.
• Single paper summaries (or just cut & paste versions of published papers) are inappropriate for the ACM SRC. Submissions should include at least one year worth of research contributions, but not subsuming an entire doctoral thesis load.

Note that this event is different than other ACM/SIGDA sponsored or supported events at DAC or ICCAD: RNYF brings together seniors and 1st year graduate students at DAC, UBooth features demos from research groups, DASS allows graduate students to get up to speed on lectures on design automation, while the PhD Forum showcases post-proposal PhD research at DAC and the CADathlon allows graduate students to compete in a programming contest at ICCAD.

The ACM Student Research Competition allows both graduate and undergraduate students to discuss their research with student peers, as well as academic and industry researchers, in an informal setting, while enabling them to attend ICCAD and compete with other ACM SRC winners from other computing areas in the ACM Grand Finals. Travel grant recipients cannot receive travel support from any other ICCAD or ACM/SIGDA sponsored program.

This year we plan to reserve as many as 5 poster session spots for undergraduate attendees to encourage their continuous investigation in the design automation field. The exact number is subject to the total undergraduates’ submissions as well as the quality of the works.
 
Online Submission – EasyChair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=srciccad2019
 
Important dates:

• Abstract submission deadline: 11:59pm, PST, August 17, 2019
• Acceptance notification: September 01 08, 2019
• Poster session: 11:30am–1:30pm, Nov. 04 (Monday) @Westminster Foyer
• Presentation session: 6:45–8:15pm, Nov. 04 (Monday) @Westminster I Ballroom
• Award winners announced at ACM SIGDA Dinner: 6:45–8:30pm, Nov. 5 (Tuesday) @Legacy Ballroom
• Grand Finals winners honored at ACM Awards Banquet: June 2020 (Estimated)

Requirement:
Students submitting and presenting their work at SRC@ICCAD’19 are required to be members of both ACM and ACM SIGDA.
 
Organizers:
Bei Yu (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
Robert Wille (Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria)

Call for Participation

ACM SIGDA/IEEE CEDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC 2021 https://www.sigda.org/sigda-events/phd-forum/

DAC Ph.D. Forum

Virtual | Dec 6

The Ph.D. Forum at the Design Automation Conference is a poster session hosted by ACM SIGDA for Ph.D. students to present and discuss their dissertation research with people in the EDA community. It has become one of the premier forums for Ph.D. students in design automation to get feedback on their research. It enables the industry and other academicians to see latest top academic work and have access to best graduating students in one place. Participation in the forum is through a scientific evaluation by an expert committee consisting of academia and industry. The forum is open to all members of the design automation community and is free-of-charge. It is virtually co-located with DAC; DAC registration is not required in order to attend this event.

Program

Session I – December 6, 2021 10AM-11AM Pacific Time

Session II – December 6, 2021 11AM-Noon Pacific Time

Session III – December 6, 2021 12PM-1PM Pacific Time

Eligibility

• Dissertation topic must be relevant to the DAC community.
• Students with at least one published or accepted conference, symposium or journal paper.
• Students within 1-2 years of dissertation completion and students who have completed their dissertation during the 2020-2021 academic year. Students closer to graduation will have higher priority since the rest of the students can attend a future Ph.D. Forum with more mature results.
• Students who have presented previously at the DATE and ASP-DAC Ph.D. forums are eligible, but will be less likely to receive travel assistance.
• Previous DAC SIGDA Ph.D. forum presenters are not eligible.

Important Dates

• Abstract Submission: September 30, 2021
• Submission Link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=daforum21
• Notification Date: October 6, 2021
• Forum Presentation Date: December 6, 2021
• Location: Virtual

Submission Requirements

• A two-page PDF abstract of the dissertation (in two-column format, using 10-11 pt. fonts and single-spaced lines), including name, institution, advisor, contact information, estimated (or actual) graduation date, whether the work has been presented at ASP-DAC Ph.D. Forum or DATE Ph.D. Forum, as well as figures, and bibliography (if applicable). The two-page limit on the abstract will be strictly enforced: any material beyond the second page will be truncated before sending to the reviewers. Please include a description of the supporting paper, including the publication forum. A list of all papers authored or co-authored by the student, related to the dissertation topic and included in the two-page abstract, will strengthen the submission.
• A published (or accepted) paper, in support of the submitted dissertation abstract. The paper must be related to the dissertation topic and the publication forum must have a valid ISBN number. It will be helpful, but is not required, to include your name and the publication forum on the first page of the paper. Papers on topics unrelated to the dissertation abstract or not yet accepted will not be considered during the review process.

Please Note:

• The abstract is the key part of your submission. Write the abstract for someone familiar with your technical area, but entirely unfamiliar with your work. Clearly indicate the motivation of your Ph.D. dissertation topic, the uniqueness of your approach, as well as the potential impact your approach may have on the topic.
• In the beginning of the abstract, please indicate to which track your submission belongs to.
• Proper spelling, grammar, and coherent organization are critical: remember that the two pages may be the only information about yourself and your PhD research available to the reviewers.
• All submissions must be made electronically.
• Please include the supporting paper with the abstract in one PDF file and submit the single file. There are many free utilities available online which can merge multiple PDF files into a single file if necessary.

Topics of Interest (not limited by)

1. System-level Design, Synthesis and Optimization (including network-on-chip, system-on-chip and multi/many-core, HW/SW co-design, embedded software issues, modeling and simulation)
2. Internet of Things (IoT)
3. Autonomous Systems
4. High Level Synthesis, Logic Level Synthesis
5. Power and Reliability Analysis and Optimization (including power management from system level to circuit level, thermal management, process variability management)
6. Timing Analysis, Circuit and Interconnect Simulation
7. Physical Design and Manufacturability
8. Signal Integrity and Design Reliability
9. Verification, Testing, Pre- and Post-Silicon Validation, Failure Analysis
10. Reconfigurable and Adaptive Systems
11. Analog/Mixed Signals and RF
12. Hardware Security
13. Machine learning/AI
14. Printable and flexible hybrid electronics (FHE)
15. Emerging Design, Technologies, and Computing Methods (carbon nanotubes, molecular electronics, MEMS, microfluidic system, biologically-inspired systems, quantum computing, etc.)

Contact Information

For questions not addressed on this page, please send e-mail to Dr. Topaloglu (rasit@us.ibm.com). Please include “DAC Ph.D Forum” in the subject line of your email.

Organizing Committee

Rasit Topaloglu, IBM (Chair)

Iris Hui-Ru Jiang, National Taiwan University

Robert Wille, Johannes Kepler University, Linz

Jingtong Hu (SIGDA Representative), University of Pittsburgh

Program Committee

Problem 1: Circuit Design and Analysis
Contributed by Jianlei Yang, Beihang University
Overview: Solve Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) equation (in C++)
Reference: Iwasaki, Junichi, Masahito Mochizuki, and Naoto Nagaosa. “Current-induced skyrmion dynamics in constricted geometries,” Nature nanotechnology 8.10 (2013): 742.

Problem 2: Physical Design & Design for Manufacturability
Contributed by William Chow, Cadence
Overview: Tap assignment for gated clock network (in C++)
Reference: W-H Chen, C-K Wang, H-M Chen, Y-C Chou, and C-H Tsai, “A Comparative Study on Multisource Clock Network Synthesis,” The 22nd Workshop on Synthesis And System Integration of Mixed Information technologies (SASIMI), 2016

Problem 3: Logic & High-Level Synthesis
Overview: Boolean Function Manipulation by Quantification (in C++)
Reference: No specific reference is provided.

Problem 4: System Design & Analysis
Contributed by Andy Yu-Guang Chen, National Central University
Overview: On-line Wake-up Scheduling for Multi-module design (in C++)
Reference 1: D. Brelaz, “New Methods to Color the Vertices of a Graph,” Communications of the ACM, Vol.22, Issue 4, Apr. 1979.
Reference 2: M.C. Lee, Y. Shi, Y.G. Chen, D. Marculescu, S.C. Chang, “Efficient On-Line Module-Level Wake-Up Scheduling for High Performance Multi-Module Designs,” Proc. on the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), 2012, Page(s): 97-104.

Problem 5: Functional Verification & Testing
Contributed by Hao Zheng, University of South Florida
Overview: Cycle-based logic simulation (in C++)
Reference 1: S. Palnitkar and D. Parham, “Cycle Simulation Techniques,” IEEE International Verilog HDL Conference, 1995, Page(s) 2-8.
Reference 2: A. Biere, “The AIGER And-Inverter Graph (AIG) Format, Version 20070427,” Johannes Kepler University, 2006-2007

Problem 6: Future technologies (Bio-EDA, Security, AI, etc.)
Contributed by Mimi Xie, The University of Texas at San Antonio and Caiwen Ding, University of Connecticut
Overview: Efficient Pruning for Neural Networks (in Python)
Reference: Han, Song, Jeff Pool, John Tran, and William Dally. “Learning both weights and connections for efficient neural network,” In Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 1135-1143. 2015.

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 2023 will be held as an in-person event.

The CADathlon is a challenging, all-day, programming competition focusing on practical problems at the forefront of Computer-Aided Design, and Electronic Design Automation in particular. The contest emphasizes the knowledge of algorithmic techniques for CADapplications, problem-solving and programming skills, as well as teamwork.

As the “Olympic games of EDA,” the contest brings together the best and the brightest of the next generation of CAD professionals. It gives academia and the industry a unique perspective on challenging problems and rising stars, and it also helps attract top graduate students to the EDA field.

The contest is open to two-person teams of undergraduate/graduate students specializing in CAD and currently full-time enrolled in a Ph.D. granting institution in any country. Students are selected based on their academic backgrounds and their relevant EDA programming experiences. Partial or full travel grants are provided to qualifying students. CADathlon competition may consist of six problems in the following areas:

• Circuit Design & Analysis
• Physical Design & Design for Manufacturability
• Logic & High-Level Synthesis
• System Design & Analysis
• Functional Verification & Testing
• Future technologies (Bio-EDA, Security, AI, etc.)

More specific information about the problems and relevant research papers will be released on the Internet one week prior to the competition. The writers and judges that construct and review the problems are experts in EDA from both academia and industry. At the contest, students will be given the problem statements and example test data, but they will not have the judges’ test data. Solutions will be judged on correctness and efficiency. Where appropriate, partial credit might be given.

The team that earns the highest score is declared the winner. In addition to handsome trophies, the first place and the second place teams receive cash award, and the contest winners will be announced at the ICCAD conference.

• Cash Prize
  • First place award: 1500 per person
  • Second place award: 750 per person
• Participation Request (please submit via Google Form)
• Important dates
  • October 10th, 2023: Participation request form due
  • October 14th, 2023: Participation acceptance announcement
  • October 22th, 2023: Release of topic/hardware details
  • October 29th, 2023: Contest date

• Problems and References:
  2022’s / 2019’s / 2018’s /  2017’s / 2016’s / 2015’s / 2014’s / 2013’s / 2012’s / archive
• Organization Committee
  • Chair: Andy, Yu-Guang Chen, National Central University, Taiwan
  • Co-chair: Jeff (Jun) Zhang, Arizona State University, USA
  • Co-chair: Zahra Ghodsi, Purdue University, USA
  • Co-chair: Pei-Yu (Billy) Lee, Synopsys, Taiwan
• Contact: andyygchen.nuc at gmail dot com

Global Education Partner:

ACM Student Research Competition at ICCAD 2018 (SRC@ICCAD’18)

DEADLINE: September 02, 2018 
Online Submission: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=srciccad18
 
Sponsored by Microsoft Research, the ACM Student Research Competition is an internationally recognized venue enabling undergraduate and graduate students who are ACM members to:

• Experience the research world — for many undergraduates this is a first!
• Share research results and exchange ideas with other students, judges, and conference attendees
• Rub shoulders with academic and industry luminaries
• Understand the practical applications of their research
• Perfect their communication skills
• Receive prizes and gain recognition from ACM and the greater computing community.

The ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM SIGDA) is organizing such an event in conjunction with the International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). Authors of accepted submissions will get travel grants up to $500 from ACM/Microsoft and ICCAD registration fee support from SIGDA. The event consists of several rounds, as described at http://src.acm.org/ and http://www.acm.org/student-research-competition, where you can also find more details on student eligibility and timeline.
 
The first-place winner in the graduate category at SRC@ICCAD’17, Meng Li (University of Texas at Austin), also won the First Place in the 2018 ACM SRC Grand Finals!
 
The first-place winner in the undergraduate category at SRC@ICCAD’16, Jennifer Vaccaro (Olin College of Engineering), also won the Second Place in the 2017 ACM SRC Grand Finals: http://www.acm.org/media-center/2017/june/src-2017-grand-finals.
 
Details on abstract submission:
Research projects from all areas of design automation are encouraged. The author submitting the abstract must still be a student at the time the abstract is due. Each submission should be made on the EasyChair submission site. Please include the author’s name, affiliation, postal address, and email address; research advisor’s name; ACM student member number; category (undergraduate or graduate); research title; and an extended abstract (maximum 2 pages or 800 words) containing the following sections:

• Problem and Motivation: This section should clearly state the problem being addressed and explain the reasons for seeking a solution to this problem.
• Background and Related Work: This section should describe the specialized (but pertinent) background necessary to appreciate the work. Include references to the literature where appropriate, and briefly explain where your work departs from that done by others. Reference lists do not count towards the limit on the length of the abstract.
• Approach and Uniqueness: This section should describe your approach in attacking the problem and should clearly state how your approach is novel.
• Results and Contributions: This section should clearly show how the results of your work contribute to computer science and should explain the significance of those results. Include a separate paragraph (maximum of 100 words) for possible publication in the conference proceedings that serves as a succinct description of the project.
• Single paper summaries (or just cut & paste versions of published papers) are inappropriate for the ACM SRC. Submissions should include at least one year worth of research contributions, but not subsuming an entire doctoral thesis load.

Note that this event is different than other ACM/SIGDA sponsored or supported events at DAC or ICCAD: YSSP brings together seniors and 1st year graduate students at DAC, UBooth features demos from research groups, DASS allows graduate students to get up to speed on lectures on design automation, while the PhD Forum showcases post-proposal PhD research at DAC and the CADathlon allows graduate students to compete in a programming contest at ICCAD.
The ACM Student Research Competition allows both graduate and undergraduate students to discuss their research with student peers, as well as academic and industry researchers, in an informal setting, while enabling them to attend DAC and compete with other ACM SRC winners from other computing areas in the ACM Grand Finals. Travel grant recipients cannot receive travel support from any other ICCAD or ACM/SIGDA sponsored program.
This year we plan to reserve as many as 5 poster session spots for undergraduate attendees to encourage their continuous investigation in design automation field. The exact number is subject to the total undergraduates submissions as well as the quality of the works.
 
Online Submission – EasyChair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=srciccad18
 
Important dates:

• Abstract submission deadline: 11:59pm, PST, September 02, 2018
• Acceptance notification: September 17, 2018
• Poster session: November 5, 2018 from 11:30am–1:30pm, Private Dinning Room
• Presentation session: November 5, 2018 from 6:45pm–8:30pm, Saint Tropez Room
• Award winners announced at ACM SIGDA Dinner: November 6, 2018, from 6:30pm
• Grand Finals winners honored at ACM Awards Banquet: June 2019 (Estimated)

 
Requirement:
Students submitting and presenting their work at SRC@ICCAD’18 are required to be members of both ACM and ACM SIGDA.
 
Organizers:
Cheng Zhuo (Zhejiang University, China)
Bei Yu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

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 made online at Submission Site. Please upload a single PDF file that has the following:

1. Title of your demonstration
2. List of authors with their affiliations
3. An extended abstract of up to 2 pages excluding figures and references
4. A YouTube link to a 5-minute online video teaser. If you are not able to upload it to YouTube, please include another link to your video teaser.
5. You may optionally attach a supporting paper.

Submission deadline: May 20, 2024, 11:59 PM AOE

Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=uddac2024

Notification of Acceptance will be on June 5, 2024.

AWARD AND STUDENT SUPPORT INFORMATION

There will be three “University Demo Best Demonstration” awards and travel support for presenters up to $700 for each team to attend the University Demonstration event in person for the accepted submissions.

The presenter will be provided full registration to this year’s DAC.

The winners will be announced at the conference after the demonstration. The presenter will only be eligible for travel support if he/she does not receive any travel support from other events at DAC such as Ph.D. Forum or Young Fellowship.
First Place $1000
Second Place $750
Third Place $500

The teams whose submissions got accepted should do the following for UDDAC 2024.

1. The presenter’s name and title
2. In-person video demonstrations are mandatory and should include a brief title sequence identifying the name of the research group and university, the team members, and stating “University Demonstration at DAC 2024.” Otherwise, there is complete freedom in how a group wishes to present its work.

Organizing Committee

Chair – Umamaheswara Rao Tida, North Dakota State University.
umamaheswara.tida@ndsu.edu
Vice Chair – Nan Wu, George Washington University.
nan.wu@gwu.edu
Vice Co-chair – Sumitha George, North Dakota State University.
sumitha.george@ndsu.edu

2023 University Demonstration Awardees

2023 ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference 33rd University Demonstration (UDDAC) was held on July 10th, 2023, 7 PM to 9 PM, at Level 3 Lobby, Moscone Center West, San Francisco, co-located with DAC Ph.D. Forum, DAC Young Fellow. 2023 UDDAC has exciting program with demos in medical health, robots, bioinspired computing, chips, vision transformer accelerator, VR/AR accelerator, on device learning, real-time fiber-optic processing on FPGA, high-level synthesis on multi-chip system! This year UDDAC had attracted more than 500 participants in the demo night.

🦾 First Place: “An Energy-Scalable Transformer Accelerator Supporting Adaptive Model Configuration and Word Elimination”

by Zexi Ji, Hanrui Wang , Miaorong Wang, Win-San Khwa, Meng-Fan Chang, Song Han and Anantha Chandrakasan

from MIT, TSMC Corporate Research

🦾 Second Place: “Gen-NeRF: Efficient and Generalizable Neural Radiance Fields via Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design”

by Yonggan Fu Yongan Zhang Zhongzhi Yu Sixu Li Zhifan Ye and Yingyan (Celine) Lin

from Georgia Institute of Technology

🦾Third Place: “FPGA HLS acceleration on real-time fiber-optic-based pedestrian recognition system”

by Yuqi Li and Kevin Chen

from University of Pittsburgh

DAC60 UDDAC is sponsored by ACM SIGDA, IEEE CEDA, Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys Inc!

Thank you Dr. Angela Hwang from Synopsys and Dr. Zhuo Li from Cadence for supporting us!

Thank you Michelle Clancy Fuller, Alexis Bauer Kolak and Maddie Walczak for the constant support!

Congratulations to all the DAC60 UDDAC awardees!

DAC60 UDDAC Organizing Committee

• Chair: Peipei Zhou (University of Pittsburgh, peipei.zhou@pitt.edu)
• Vice Chair: Umamaheswara Rao Tida (North Dakota State University, umamaheswara.tida@ndsu.edu)
• Vice Co-Chair: Sumitha George (North Dakota State University, sumitha.george@ndsu.edu)

SIGDA University Demonstration (UD, previously University Booth) is a great opportunity for university researchers to showcase their results and to interact with participants at the Design Automation Conference (DAC). Presenters and attendees at DAC are especially encouraged to participate, but participation is open to all members of the university community. The demonstrations include new EDA tools, EDA tool applications, design projects, and instructional materials.

The University Demonstration will be held together with the SIGDA Ph.D. Forum at DAC.

2022 University Demonstration Awardees

First Place

Title: i-FlatCam: A 253 FPS, 91.49 μJ/Frame Ultra-Compact Intelligent Lensless Camerafor Real-Time and Efficient Eye Tracking in VR/AR, 

Authors: Yang Zhao, Shunyao Zhang, Chaojian Li, Cheng Wan, Shang Wu, Yonggan Fu, Yongan Zhang, Haoran You, Xu Ouyang, Ziyun Li, Vivek Boominathan, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Yingyan Lin

Second Place

Title: Seismic Waveform Inversion Capability on Resource-constrained Edge Devices

Authors: Daniel Manu, Petro Tshakwanda, Lin Youzuo, WeiwenJiang, and Lei Yang

Third Place (2 teams)

Title: Multi-modal Sentiment Analysis: from Robustness Perspective

Authors: Yubo Du and Peipei Zhou

Title: Memory-Efficient FPGA Architecture for Multi-Task Vision Transformer using Mixture-of-Experts

Authors: Rishov Sarkar, Hanxue Liang, Zhiwen Fan, ZhangyangWang, and Cong Hao

The Student Research Forum at the ASP-DAC is renovated from a traditional poster session hosted by ACM SIGDA for PhD students to present and discuss their dissertations with experts in the design automation community. Starting from 2015, the forum includes both PhD and MS students, offering great opportunity for the students to establish contacts for their future career. In addition, the forum helps the companies and academic institutes to get an overview of the latest research and discover the extraordinary candidates for their employment.

This Year’s Awards (2022)

Best Poster – Research
Intelligent Circuit Design and Implementation with Machine Learning in EDA
Zhiyao Xie, Duke University

Best Poster – Presentation
Algorithm-Hardware Co-design of Transformer on FPGA Devices
Xinyi Zhang, University of Pittsburgh 

Most Popular Poster
ASBP: Automatic Structured Bit-Pruning for RRAM-based NN Accelerator
Songyun Qu, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Call for Submission: SIGDA Student Research Forum at ASP-DAC 2021 (SRF@ASP-DAC 2021)

Considering ASP-DAC 2021 is going virtual due to COVID-19, SRF@ASP-DAC 2021 will be held as a virtual forum. The forum welcomes all students, professors and industrial professionals from the relevant research community. The student author of each accepted submission by the forum is required to have a registration to ASP-DAC 2021 at least at the full student rate. The forum will provide financial support equivalent to the full student rate for each accepted submission.

ELIGIBILITY

• Students must be within 1 year (M.S.) or 2 years (Ph.D.) of dissertation completion or have completed their dissertation during the last 12 months.
• Dissertation topic must be relevant to the ASP-DAC community.
• Previous ASP-DAC forum presenters are not eligible.
• Students who have presented previously at DAC/DATE PhD forums are eligible.
• Only students with at least one published or accepted conference, symposium or journal “full” paper are eligible for awards.
• Students must attend the forum virtually to present the poster in person without substitute presentations, or else please contact the SRF Chair in advance.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
A two-page PDF abstract of the dissertation (in two-column format, using 10pt. fonts and single-spaced lines), including name, institution, adviser, contact information, estimated (or actual) graduation date, whether the work has been presented at DAC PhD Forum or DATE PhD Forum, as well as figures and bibliography (if applicable). The two-page limit on the abstract will be strictly enforced: any material beyond the second page will be ignored by the reviewers. Each accepted abstract has to prepare a poster and a short video presentation, and the student has to attend the forum virtually for real-time interactions.

To be considered for awards, a student must explicitly indicate, in the title of the two-page abstract, the venues for which the work was published or accepted, and a list of all papers authored or co-authored by the student should be included in the bibliography of the two-page abstract. The papers must be related to the dissertation topic. Those on topics unrelated to the dissertation abstract will not be considered.

Submission website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aspdacsrf2021

IMPORTANT DATES
  Submission Deadline: November 30, 2020 (firm)
  Date of Acceptance Notification: December 14, 2020
  Poster and Short Video Submission Deadline: January 5, 2021
  Forum Date: January 19, 2021

CONTACT INFORMATION
For queries, please send an e-mail to Prof. Weichen Liu (liu [at] ntu.edu.sg). Please include “SRF@ASP-DAC 2021” in the subject of your email.

Organizers

Chair:
Weichen Liu, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Co-Chairs:
Lei Jiang, Indiana University Bloomington, US
Yaoyao Ye, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Secretariat:
Jun Zhou, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Technical Committee:
Hiromitsu Awano, Kyoto University, Japan
Donkyu Baek, Chungbuk National University, Korea
Ateet Bhalla, Independent Technology Consultant, India
Yuan-Hao Chang, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Wanli Chang, University of York, UK
Xianzhang Chen, Chongqing University, China
Yi-Jung Chen, National Chi Nan University, Taiwan
Xiang Chen, George Mason University, US
Haibao Chen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Sudipta Chattopadhyay, Singapore Univ. of Technology and Design, Singapore
Hsiang-Yun Cheng, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Luan Huu Kinh Duong, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Shao-Yun Fang, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Ann Gordon-Ross, University of Florida, US
Chien-Chung Ho, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan
Weiwen Jiang, University of Notre Dame, US
Yukihide Kohira, The University of Aizu, Japan
Hyung-Gyu Lee, Daegu University, Korea
Sicheng Li, Hewlett Packard Labs, US
Yongfu Li, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Qingan Li, Wuhan University, China
Chun-Han Lin, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan
Ren-Shuo Liu, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
Jaehyun Park, University of Ulsan, Korea
Muhammad Shafique, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE
Liang Shi, East China Normal University, China
Donghwa Shin, Soongsil University, Korea
Masashi Tawada, Waseda University, Japan
Hoeseok Yang, Ajou University, Korea
Ming-Chang Yang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
Lei Yang, University of New Mexico, US
Bei Yu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
Qian Zhang, University of California, Los Angeles, US
ASP-DAC liaison:
Masashi Tawada, Waseda University, Japan
Yukio Mitsuyama, Kochi University of Technology, Japan

Sponsors