July 2023

Jianli Chen

Professor

State Key Laboratory of ASIC and System,
Fudan University

Email:

chenjianli@fudan.edu.cn

Personal webpage

https://sme.fudan.edu.cn/5f/c6/c31141a352198/page.htm

Research interests

Algorithms for VLSI Physical Design

Short bio

Jianli Chen is currently a professor at the State Key Laboratory of ASIC and System, Fudan University. He received the B.Sc. degree in information and computing sciences, the M.Sc. degree in computer application technology, and the Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics, all from Fuzhou University, in 2007, 2009, and 2012, respectively. His research interests include optimization theory and applications, and optimization methods for VLSI physical design automation.

Dr. Chen has received two Best Paper Awards from the International Forum on Operations Research and Control Theory in 2011 and the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in 2017, three Best Paper Award candidates from DAC, and two Best Paper Award candidates from the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD). He and his group were the recipient of the First Place Award at the CAD Contest at ICCAD in 2017, 2018 and 2019, respectively. Dr. Chen has also received multiple government honors and industry awards, such as the Integrated Circuit Early Career Award from China Computer Federation in 2018, the Youth Science Award for Applied Mathematics from China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2020, the First Prize of Shanghai Technology Invention Award in 2020, the Special Prize for Excellent Project Award from Shanghai Industry-University-Institute Cooperation in 2021, the First Prize of the Natural Science Award from the Ministry of Education in 2022. He has served as a design automation technical committee of IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) since January 2018. He is the founder of LEDA Technology, Shanghai, China.

Research highlights

1. Proposed an analytical approach to deal with the NP-hard problem of VLSI mixed-cell-height legalization. The paper ‘Toward Optimal Legalization for Mixed-cell-height Circuit Designs,’ based on this achievement, won the DAC 2017 Best Paper Award.
2. Led the research team to win three champions at the CAD Contest at ICCAD from 2017 to 2019, the 2^nd place in ICCAD’20, the 3rd place in ICCAD’21, and the 1^st place in ISPD Contest 2023. Furthermore, the team’s achievements have become an integral part of the core technology used in LEDA’s products.
3. Developed placement engine, which is capable of efficiently processing tens of millions of cells. This innovation has significantly contributed to the advancement of integrated circuit placement algorithms and has been incorporated into the IEEE CEDA Reference Design Flow (RDF) since 2019.