Professor Cong's Vita

Jingsheng Jason Cong

University of California, Los Angeles
Computer Science Department
468A Engineering VI, Los Angeles, California 90095
Tel: (310) 206-2775

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computer Science:  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990
  • M.S. in Computer Science: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987
  • B.S. in Computer Science: Peking University, 1985

Professional Experience

1990–Present: University of California, Los Angeles,

  • Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence (2020 – present)
  • Distinguished Chancellor’s Professor (2014 – present), Computer Science Department
  • Chancellor’s Professor (2008 – 2014), Computer Science Departmen
  • Director, Center of Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC) (2009 – present)
  • Director, VLSI Architecture, Synthesis, and Technology (VAST) Laboratory (used to be VLSI CAD Laboratory) (1991 – present)
  • Associate Vice Provost for Internationalization and Co-Director of UCLA/PKU Student and Scholar Program (2010 – present)
  • Department Chair (2005 – 2008), Computer Science Department
  • Professor  (1998 – present); Associate Professor  (1994 – 1998); Assistant Professor (1990 – 1994)

2022-Present: Consultant, Jump Trading

2022 (Aug-Dec): Visiting researcher, Harvard University

2019-Present: Consultant, Cadence Design Systems, CA

2014–2020: Co-founder, Chief Scientific Advisor, and Chairman of Board of Directors, Falcon Computing Solutions, Inc.

2011–2013: Co-founder, Chief Technology Advisor, and Chairman of Board of Directors, Neptune Design Automation (acquired by Xilinx in Oct. 2013).

2010–2020: Distinguished visiting professor, Peking University.

2006–2010: Co-founder, Chief Technology Advisor, and Chairman of Board of Directors, AutoESL Design Technologies (acquired by Xilinx in Jan. 2011).

2003–2008: Chief Technology Advisor, Magma Design Automation

  1998–2003: Founder and CEO/President, Aplus Design Technologies, Inc. (acquired by Magma in 2003)               

  1994 (summer): Visiting Faculty, Intel Corporation

  1986–1990: Research Assistant, Computer Science Dept., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Honors and Awards

  • Selected to receive the 2025 ISPD Lifetime Achievement Award, to be presented at the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) in Austin, TX, on March 16-19, 2025. 

  • Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, April 24, 2024.

  • Recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Scientist Award from the Chinese Association for Science and Technology, USA (CAST-USA) at its 31st Annual Meeting and Global Innovation Summit, October 14, 2023, Irvine, CA.

  • Recipient of the 2023 Best Paper Award from the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), July 2023, for the paper entitled "AutoDSE: Enabling Software Programmers to Design Efficient FPGA Accelerators" published in February 2022.

  • Recipient of the “Global Industry Leader” Award from ChipEx’2023, May 8, 2023, Tel Aviv, Israel, for “groundbreaking research and development which revolutionized electronic design automation and FPGA design methods, for co-founding several chip design related companies, and for teaching hundreds of UCLA students, many of them who now hold influential roles in the semiconductor industry”.

  • Class of 2023 Inductees to the TCFPGA Hall of Fame, February 2023, for the paper “Application-Specific Instruction Generation for Configurable Processor Architectures” published in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM/SIGDA 12th International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (February 2004).

  • Recipient of the 2023 European Design and Automation Association (EDAA) Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to state of the art in electronic design, automation and testing of electronic systems in their life, February 2023.

  • The ASP-DAC 2023 Ten-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award for the paper entitled “Optimizing Routability in Large-Scale Mixed-Size Placement” published in ASP-DAC in 2013.

  • Recipient of the 2022 Robert N. Noyce Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for fundamental contributions to electronic design automation and FPGA design methods, May 2022.

  • Best Paper Award, the 30th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, March 2022 for the paper “RapidStream: Parallel Physical Implementation of FPGA HLS Designs”.

  • FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame inducted the papers “An Efficient and Versatile Scheduling Algorithm Based On SDC Formulation" and “FCUDA: Enabling Efficient Compilation of CUDA Kernels onto FPGAs" into the inaugural class of the Hall of Fame, 2022.

  • Best Paper Award, the 29th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, March 2021, for the paper “AutoBridge: Coupling Coarse-Grained Floorplanning and Pipelining for High-Frequency HLS Design on Multi-Die FPGAs”.

  • Prof. Jason Cong elected to the Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, December 9, 2020.

  • Prof. Jason Cong has been appointed as the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence in the Samueli School of Engineering, October 5, 2020.

  • ASP-DAC Prolific Author Award from Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference 2020, Beijing, China, January 13-16, 2020.

  • University Research Award for excellence in semiconductor design research, Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), in collaboration with the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), November 7, 2019.

  • 2019 IEEE/ACM William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award, International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), November 2019, for the paper "Analyzing and Modeling In-Storage Computing Workloads On EISC -- An FPGA-Based System-Level Emulation Platform."

  • Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award, Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 4, 2019, for the paper "Caffeine: Towards Uniformed Representation and Acceleration for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks."

  • Chinese-American Engineers and Scientists Association of Southern California (CESASC) Achievement Award, April 2019

  • Google Faculty Research Award (two times), 2019, 2015.

  • Best Paper Award, 27th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, February 2019, for the paper, "HeteroCL: A Multi-Paradigm Programming Infrastructure for Software-Defined Reconfigurable Computing”

  • Best Paper Award, The International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED), July 2018, for the paper "CLINK: Compact LSTM Inference Kernel for Energy Efficient Neurofeedback Devices".

  • Outstanding Oversea Contribution Award by the China Computer Federation (CCF), October 2017.

  • Best Paper Award, the International Symposium on Memory Systems (MEMSYS), Oct 2017, for the paper “AIM: Accelerating Computational Genomics through Scalable and Noninvasive Accelerator-Interposed Memory”.

  • PhD advisor of Bingjun Xiao whose dissertation “Communication Optimization for Customizable Domain-Specific Computing” received the 2016 EDAA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award.

  • FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame inducted the paper "Flow Map: An Optimal Technology Mapping Algorithm for Delay Optimization in Look-Up Table Based FPGA Designs” into the inaugural class of the Hall of Fame, 2017. 

  • Member of the National Academy of Engineering, among the highest honors that can be accorded to an American engineer “for pioneering contributions to application-specific programmable logic via innovations in field programmable gate array (FPGA) synthesis”, 2017.

  • The ASP-DAC’17 Ten-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award for the paper entitled “Thermal-Aware 3D IC Placement Via Transformation” published in ASP-DAC in 2007. 

  • PhD advisor of Bingjun Xiao whose dissertation “Communication Optimization for Customizable Domain-Specific Computing” received the 2016 EDAA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award.

  • IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2016), “For setting the algorithmic foundations for high-level synthesis of field programmable gate arrays”.

  • The ASPDAC’15 Ten Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award for the paper titled “Thermal-Driven Multilevel Routing for 3-D ICs” published in  the 2005 Asia South-Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASPDAC).

  • The ICCAD’14 Ten Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award for the paper titled “A Thermal-Driven Floorplanning Algorithm for 3D ICs"published in 2004 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD).

  • Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, October 24, 2014.

  • Best Paper Award, 2013 International Conference on Hardware/Software Co-design and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS 2013) for the paper “Improving Polyhedral Code Generation for High-Level Synthesis”.

  • The 50th Design Automation Conference Prolific Author Award -- DAC 40 Club for publishing 40-49 papers in the first 50 years of DAC.

  • PhD advisor of Dr. Guojie Luo whose thesis entitled "Placement and Design Planning for 3D Integrated Circuits" received the 2013 ACM SIGDA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award in electronic design automation.

  • 2013 ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) Best Paper Award for "“Automatic Memory Partitioning and Scheduling for Throughput and Power Optimization, ” published in March 2011.

  • Best Paper Award, 2013 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (for the paper “Polyhedral-Based Data Reuse Optimization for Configurable Computing”).

  • 2012 ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) Best Paper Award for "Behavior-Level Observability Analysis for Operation Gating in Low-Power Behavioral Synthesis” published in Nov. 2010.

  • IBM Faculty Award (three times), 2002, 2006, and 2012.

  • Two papers of Dr. Cong and his former students (in FPGA’95 and FPGA’99) were selected for FPGA20: the most significant contributions in the FPGA Symposium from 1992 – 2001.

  • ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electric Design Automation (2011), “for pioneering work on technology mapping for FPGA that has made significant impact to the FPGA research community and industry.”

  • Best Paper Award, IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (2011)

  • IEEE Circuits and System (CAS) Society Technical Achievement Award (2010), “for seminal contributions to electronic design automation, especially in FPGA synthesis, VLSI interconnect optimization, and physical design automation.”

  • Best Paper Award, 2009 IEEE Symposium on Application Specific Processors (SASP)

  • Semiconductor Research Corporation Inventor Recognition Award (2009)

  • ACM Fellow (2008),“for contributions to electronic design automation”.

  • Best Paper Award, 2008 Int’l Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)

  • Semiconductor Research Corporation Inventor Recognition Award (2006)

  • Outstanding Alumni Award of Peking University (2005)

  • Best Paper Award, 2005 International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) (April 2005)

  • Best Paper Award, ACM Transaction on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) (2005)

  • Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (2004-2005)

  • Okawa Foundation Research Grant (2004)

  • Semiconductor Research Corporation Technical Excellence Award (2000), for his work in area "Interconnect Estimation Planning and Synthesis for Deep Sub-micron Designs"

  • IEEE Fellow (2000) “for seminal contributions in computer-aided design of integrated circuits, especially in physical design automation, interconnect optimization, and synthesis of field-programmable gate-arrays.”

  • Semiconductor Research Corporation Inventor Recognition Award (2000)

  • Guest Professorship, Peking University (2000)

  • ACM SIGDA Meritorious Service Award (1998)

  • ACM Recognition of Service Award (1997)

  • Best Paper Award of IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design from IEEE Circuits and System Society (1995)

  • National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award (1993)

  • Northrop Corporation Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award from UCLA (1993)

  • National Science Foundation Engineering Research Initiation Award (1991)

  • Ross J. Martin Award for Excellence in Research from University of Illinois (1989)

  • DEC Fellowship in Computer Science (1988)

  • Best Graduate Award from Peking University (1985)

Graduated Students

PhD Graduates

  1. Eugene Ding (Ph.D. 1995), MTS, Bell Laboratories
  2. Patrick Madden (Ph.D. 1998), Professor, State Univ. of New York at Binghamton
  3. Cheng-Kok Koh (Ph.D. 1998), Professor, Purdue University
  4. Yeanyow Hwang (Ph.D. 1999), Senior Software Engineer, Synopsys
  5. Chang Wu (Ph.D. 1999), Senior Engineer, Magma Design Automation
  6. Lei He (Ph.D. 1999), Professor, Univ. of California, Los Angeles
  7. Sung-Kyu Lim (Ph.D. 2000), Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
  8. Sarah Songjie Xu (Ph.D. 2000), Senior Manager, Magma Design Automation
  9. David Zhigang Pan (Ph.D. 2000), Professor, University of Austin, Texas
  10. Jie Fang (Ph.D. 2001), Senior Engineer, Broadcom Corporation
  11. Chin-Chih Chang (Ph.D. 2002), Member of Consulting Staff, Cadence
  12. Tianming (Tim) Kong (Ph.D. 2002), Senior Engineer, Magma Design Automation
  13. Xin Yuan (Ph.D. 2003), EDA Software Developer, IBM Corporation
  14. Michail Romesis (Ph.D. 2005), Member of Technical Staff, Magma Design Automation
  15. Michael Gang Chen (Ph.D. 2005), CEO of Nimbus
  16. Ashok Jagannathan (Ph.D. 2005), Senior Platform Simulation Engineer, Intel Corporation
  17. Deming Chen (Ph. D. 2005), Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  18. Kenton Sze, (Ph. D. 2006), Sr. Member of Technical Staff, Magma Design Automation
  19. Yan Zhang (Ph.D. 2006), Sr. Member of Technical Staff, Magma Design Automation
  20. Min Xie (Ph.D. 2006),  Sr. Member of Technical Staff, KBC
  21. Joey Yizhou Lin, (Ph.D. 2006), CEO of Arcadia Design Automation
  22. Yiping Fan, (Ph.D. 2006), manager, Xilinx, Co-founder of AutoESL
  23. Zhiru Zhang (Ph.D. 2007), Assistant Professor, Cornell University, Co-founder of AutoESL
  24. Guoling Han (Ph.D. 2007), Sr. Engineer, AutoESL Design Technologies
  25. Wei Jiang (Ph.D. 2009), Google Inc.
  26. Kirill Minkovich (Ph.D. 2010), Postdoc, HRL Laboratories
  27. Guojie Luo (Ph.D. 2011), Assistant Professor, Peking University, Beijing, China
  28. Yi Zou (Ph.D., 2012), Software Engineer, Arsita Networks
  29. Chunyue Liu (PhD, 2012,) SW engineer, Google
  30. Bin Liu (PhD, 2012), Sr. Architect, Micron.
  31. Karthik Gururaj (PhD, 2013), hardware engineer, Intel Corporation.
  32. Hui Huang (PhD, 2014), Google
  33. Bingjun Xiao (PhD, 2015), Google
  34. Yu-Ting Chen (PhD, 2016), Google
  35. Muhuan Huang (PhD, 2016), Google
  36. Di Wu (PhD, 2017), Falcon Computing Solutions, Inc.
  37. Peng Wei (PhD, 2018), Google
  38. Cody Hao Yu (PhD, 2019), Amazon
  39. Peipei Zhou (PhD, 2019), University of Pittsburgh
  40. Young-kyu Choi (PhD, 2019), Inha University
  41. Jie Wang (PhD, 2021), Amazon
  42. Yuze Chi (PhD, 2021), Google
  43. Weikang Qiao (PhD, 2022), Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  44. Licheng Guo (PhD, 2022), RapidStream Design Automation
  45. Atefeh Sohrabizadeh (PhD, 2024), Nvidia

MS Graduates

  1. M'lissa Smith (MS 1992)
  2. Antonios Papandreous (MS 1992)
  3. Huy Cao (MS 1993)
  4. Ka-Kei Kwok (MS 1994)
  5. Jenny Z. Li (MS 1994)
  6. Jeff Liao (MS 1995)
  7. John Peck (MS 1995)
  8. Huan Liu (MS 1996)
  9. Sung Lim (MS 1997)
  10. David Zhigang Pan (MS 1998) 
  11. Liding Sun (MS 1999)
  12. Michail Romesis (MS 2001)
  13. Michael (Gang) Chen (MS 2001)
  14. Deming Chen (MS 2001)
  15. Yizhou (Joey) Lin (MS 2002)
  16. Yiping Fan (MS 2003)
  17. Min Xie (MS 2003)
  18. Zhiru Zhang (MS 2003)
  19. Jie Wei (MS 2004)
  20. Guoling Han (MS 2004)
  21. Wei Jiang (MS 2006)
  22. Yan Zhang (MS 2006)
  23. Kirill Minkovich (MS 2006) 
  24. Amit Agarwal (MS 2008)
  25. Guojie Luo (MS 2008)
  26. Albert Liu (MS 2009)
  27. Bin Liu (MS 2009)
  28. Chunyue Liu (MS 2009)
  29. Yanshu Fan (MS 2009)
  30. Xiangping Qiu (MS 2010)
  31. Yuhui Huang (MS 2010)
  32. Raghu Prabhakar (MS 2012)
  33. Bo Yuan (MS 2014)
  34. Sen Li (MS 2014)
  35. Mo Xu (MS 2014)
  36. Rajkiran Anthapur (MS 2014)
  37. Hassan Kianinejad (MS 2015)
  38. Libo Wang (MS 2016)
  39. Tianhe Yu (MS 2018)
  40. Jingxian Xu (MS 2018)
  41. Zhenyuan Ruan (MS 2019)
  42. Tong He (MS 2019)
  43. Ashutosh Chandra (MS 2020)
  44. Shaochong Zhang (MS 2020)
  45. Surya Teja Addanki (MS 2020)
  46. Carlos Andres Santillana (MS 2020)
  47. Edward Anjie Huang (MS 2021)
  48. Mrunal Patel (MS 2022)
  49. Yiming Shi (MS 2023)

Research Interests And Publications

Dr. Cong’s research interests include design automation of VLSI circuits and systems, customizable computing, quantum computing, and highly scalable algorithms. He has published over 500 research papers and led over 100 research projects funded by DARPA, NSF, SRC, UC MICRO and various industrial sponsors. A complete publications list is attached.

Patents

  • Jason Cong and Bingjun Xiao, US Patent 9,461,649, Issued on October 4, 2016, “Programmable Logic Circuit Architecture Using Resistive Memory Elements”.
  • B. Liu, Z. Zhang and J. Cong, US Patent 8,296,710, Issued on Oct 23, ,2012, "Soft Constraints in Scheduling".
  • Mau-Chung F. Chang, Jason Cong, Adam Kaplan, Mishali Naik, Glenn Reinman, Eran Socher, Sai-Wang Tam and Chunyue Liu, U.S. Patent No. 8,270,316, Issued September 18, 2012, “On-Chip Radio Frequency (RF) Interconnects for Network-on-Chip Designs”
  • Jason Cong and David Z. Pan, U.S. Patent No. 6,408,427, Issued June 18, 2002, “Wire Width Planning and Performance Optimization for VLSI Interconnects”
  • Jason Cong and David Z. Pan, U.S. Patent No. 7,013,253, Issued March 14, 2006, “Method and Apparatus for Calculation of Crosstalk Noise in Integrated Circuits”

Publications