2026 ACM SIGDA Distinguished Service Awards: Yiran Chen and Donatella Sciuto

ACM SIGDA is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 SIGDA Distinguished Service Award, presented at DAC 2026:

  • Yiran Chen (Duke University), “for many years of dedicated service in ACM SIGDA leadership roles, including guiding the community as Chair through the challenges of the pandemic.”
  • Donatella Sciuto (Politecnico di Milano), “for continuous leadership and distinguished service to the EDA community.”

The Distinguished Service Award recognizes sustained and significant contributions to SIGDA and to the design automation community.

Congratulations, Yiran and Donatella, and thank you for all you have done for our community!

More about the award: https://www.sigda.org/sigda-service-award/

ACM/SIGDA 2026 Awards Call-for-Nomination Open Now

ACM/SIGDA is pleased to announce that nominations are now open for the 2026 award cycle. We encourage the EDA community to recognize and celebrate outstanding contributions across career stages:


🔹 ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation (OPDA)

Recognizes an exceptional Ph.D. dissertation with substantial contributions to EDA theory and/or practice.
📅 Deadline: April 30, 2026
More details: ACM Outstanding PhD award


🔹 ACM/SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award

Honors an individual for lifetime, outstanding contributions and sustained impact in electronic design automation.
📅 Deadline: April 10, 2026
More details: Pioneering Achievement Award


🔹 SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award (ONFA)

Recognizes a junior faculty member demonstrating exceptional promise and impact in EDA research and education.
📅 Deadline: April 30, 2026
More details: Outstanding New Faculty Award


We strongly encourage members of the community to submit nominations and help highlight the remarkable achievements of our colleagues.

CADathlon 2022 Problem References

P1: “Memory controller enhancement via exploiting locality,” 

[1] S. Rixner, W. J. Dally, U. J. Kapasi, P. Mattson, J. D. Owens, “Memory Access Scheduling”, ISCA ’00: pp 128-138.

[2] https://www.cs.utah.edu/~rajeev/pubs/usimm.pdf

P2: “Triple Patterning Aware Detailed Placement”

[1] Bei Yu, Xiaoqing Xu, Jhih-Rong Gao, Yibo Lin, Zhuo Li, Charles Alpert and David Z. Pan, “Methodology for Standard Cell Compliance and Detailed Placement for Triple Patterning Lithography,” IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), vol.34, no.5, pp.726-739, 2015.

P3: “Modularity optimization for synchronous block diagram”

[1] Peng Deng, Qi Zhu, Marco Di Natale, and Haibo Zeng, “Task Synthesis for Latency-sensitive Synchronous Block Diagram,” SIES 2014.

P4: ” Reliability-Driven Mixed-Precision Navigation”

[1] A. Mahmoud, T. Tambe, T. Aloui, D. Brooks and G. -Y. Wei, “GoldenEye: A Platform for Evaluating Emerging Numerical Data Formats in DNN Accelerators,” 2022 52nd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2022, pp. 206-214, doi: 10.1109/DSN53405.2022.00031.

P5: “

Verifiable Execution of Deep Neural Networks”

[1] Zahra Ghodsi, Tianyu Gu, Siddharth Garg, “SafetyNets: Verifiable Execution of Deep Neural Networks on an Untrusted Cloud”, In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2017. 

P6: “Deciphering Secret Key for Provably-Secure Logic Locking Techniques” 

[1] S. Patnaik, N. Limaye and O. Sinanoglu, “Hide and Seek: Seeking the (Un)-Hidden Key in Provably-Secure Logic Locking Techniques,” in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), vol. 17, pp. 3290-3305, 2022, DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2022.3207361

[2] M. Yasin, B. Mazumdar, J.V. Rajendran, and O. Sinanoglu, “SARLock: SAT attack resistant logic locking,” 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), 2016, pp. 236-241, DOI: 10.1109/HST.2016.7495588

[3] Y. Xie and A. Srivastava, “Anti-SAT: Mitigating SAT Attack on Logic Locking,” in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 199-207, Feb. 2019, DOI: 10.1109/TCAD.2018.2801220

[4] K. Shamsi, T. Meade, M. Li, D. Z. Pan, and Y. Jin, “On the Approximation Resiliency of Logic Locking and IC Camouflaging Schemes,” in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 347-359, Feb. 2019, DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2018.2850319

P7: “Timing-driven layer assignment in global routing”

[1]D. Liu, B. Yu, S. Chowdhury and D. Z. Pan, “Incremental layer assignment for critical path timing,” 2016 53nd ACM/EDAC/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2016, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1145/2897937.2898033.