Opening

Abstract

Contests and their benchmarks have become an important driving force to push our EDA domain forward in different areas lately, such as ISPD, TAU, DAC contests. To encourage better research development on timely and practical EDA problems across all domains, a new international CAD Contest is held this year under the joint sponsorship of the IEEE CEDA and Ministry of Education (MOE) of Taiwan. Three contest problems on functional ECO, placement, and litho hotspot identification are announced this year and run by industry experts from Cadence, IBM and Mentor Graphics.The predecessor of this contest is the annual CAD Contest in Taiwan, sponsored by the Ministry of Education (MOE), which has been held for 12 consecutive years. The contest generally comprises problems contributed by EDA Vendors (Cadence, Synopsys, Springsoft), IC/IP Design houses (Faraday, Global UniChip), and research institutes (ITRI, CIC). More than one hundred teams have participated in this contest annually. Near half of all registered teams consist of undergraduate students coming from Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematical departments. Through the process of theoretical development and practical implementation in the contest, EDA has attracted many undergraduate contestants to get involved in further researches for their graduate studies. The winning teams published their techniques and results at top journal and conference papers. Most of the winners have further pursued their career in EDA area as a faculty member or a researcher or engineer at top-tier companies. CAD contest has made significant contributions to popularize EDA education and to boost the EDA research momentum in Taiwan.This session will include three presentations from the contest organizers for the three contest problems and an award ceremony. Each contest organizer (topic chair) will present detailed information about the corresponding contest problem, including problem description, benchmarks, and evaluation. Along with the contest, a new set of industrial benchmarks for each contest problem will be released and facilitate scientific evaluations of related research results. We expect that the benchmark suites will further play a key driving force to push the advancement of related research. Moreover, we also expect that the participants will submit their works to the subsequent top conferences to boost related research and also extend the impacts of this contest.