Interview of Prof. Jason Cong by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine
We are pleased to share the interview of Prof. Jason Cong by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, Prof. Yiran Chen, EiC, and Prof. Fan Chen, the Associate Editor.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10378993
Congratulations to Atefeh Sohrabizadeh for receiving the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship.
This program is intended to support doctoral students who are advanced to candidacy at the time of nomination by their department to the Division of Graduate Education. Approximately 160 fellowships are awarded under this program yearly across the UCLA campus. Atefeh's dissertation is on customized computation and machine learning. Domain-specific accelerators (DSA) can offer high performance while being energy efficient since the designer can customize all the hardware parameters such as data types, memory access, parallelism, control/data path, etc. However, they are not easy to generate, as the designer must describe their architecture at the circuit level. This has limited the DSA community to hardware designers and prevented their large adoption. We aim to alleviate this problem by combining customized computing and ML. More specifically, our efforts consist of two parts: 1) customized computing for ML applications. Because of their wide usage, we develop architecture templates for accelerating them to decrease their development cycle. 2) ML techniques to automate the optimization of customized computing for general applications. We formulate their design space and develop dedicated heuristics to efficiently explore them. Moreover, we develop ML models to predict the quality of designs in milliseconds rather than minutes/hours taken by the HLS tools. This research can open new doors to those without hardware knowledge to exploit DSAs which in turn helps to broaden its community and further improve its technology.
Former VAST member Prof. Lei He elected to IEEE Fellow for Contribution to Integrated Circuits and Smart Energy Systems
UCLA VAST Lab would like to congratulate its former member Prof. Lei He (advised by Prof. Jason Cong) who is elected to IEEE Fellow for contribution to integrated circuits and smart energy systems. Lei got PhD in 1999 and has been a professor with UCLA Electric Engineering since 2002. His current research interests include EDA and IP for chiplets and FPGAs, chips and algorithms for AI, health care and sustainability. He has graduated about 30 PhD students with over 1/3 of them teaching at research universities. He is an entrepreneur and angel investor on the side and founded or co-founded about 10 VC-funded companies, many with his former students. Congratulations, Lei! We are very proud of you.
Recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Scientist Award from the Chinese Association for Science and Technology, USA (CAST-USA) and delivered Keynote Speech
Prof. Jason Cong received the 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 in Irvine, CA. Past winners of the Outstanding Scientist Award include recipients of the Fields Medal, the Dirac Award, the Breakthrough Prize and other significant honors. More information about the award is available at https://www.cast-usa.us/single-post/the-year-s-high-profile-cast-awards-are-announced. Prof. Cong also delivered a keynote speech titled “Can We Automate Integrated Circuit Design?” at the Summit.
Chinese Association for Science and Technology, USA (CAST-USA) has over 20,000 members from diverse fields, including technology, culture, education, law, finance, and the humanities. With sixteen local chapters and professional associations throughout the United States, their members are a driving force behind scientific research, technological advancements, and cultural preservation in many US companies, universities, and research institutions.
2023 Best Paper Award from the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES)
Congratulations to Atefeh Sohrabizadeh, Cody Hao Yu, Jason Cong from UCLA and Min Gao from Falcon Computing for receiving the 2023 Best Paper Award from the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) for their paper entitled "AutoDSE: Enabling Software Programmers to Design Efficient FPGA Accelerators" published in February 2022. It presents an automated design space exploration method of different microarchitectures to enable high-performance hardware accelerator designs from software programming languages. TODAES is a premier ACM journal in design and automation of electronic systems.
Class of 2023 Inductees to the TCFPGA Hall of Fame
Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong and VAST Lab alumni, Yiping Fan, Guoling Han, Zhiru Zhang for being the Class of 2023 Inductees to the TCFPGA Hall of Fame for the paper “Application-Specific Instruction Generation for Configurable Processor Architectures” (February 2004).
http://hall-of-fame.tcfpga.org
Prof. Cong receiving the “Global Industry Leader” Award from ChipEx’2023
Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong for receiving the “Global Industry Leader” Award from ChipEx’2023 on May 8, 2023 in 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”. ChipEx is the largest annual conference dedicated to the Israeli Semiconductor Industry. The award was presented by John Neuffer, President and CEO of the (US) Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), Ami Appelbaum, Chief Scientist of the Israel Ministry of Economy & Chairman and Israel Innovation Authority, and Co-Chairman of ChipEx’2023 Ran Ginosar and Shlomo Gradman.
Previous recipients of the “Global Industry Leader” Award include global leaders in the semiconductor industry, such as Irwin Jacobs, Co-founder of Qualcomm; Henry Samueli, Co-founder of Broadcom; Ray Bingham, former CEO/Chairman of Cadence Design Systems; Wally Rhines, Chief Executive Officer, Mentor Graphics; Johny Srouji, Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies, Apple; and Andrew Viterbi, Co-Founder of Qualcomm.
Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong for receiving the 2023 EDAA Achievement Award
Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong for receiving the 2023 EDAA Achievement Award, which is given to an individual each year who made outstanding contributions to state of the art in electronic design, automation and testing of electronic systems in their life. Please see EDAA’s Press Release for more details.
https://www.edaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/EDAA_Press_Release_Cong-Revised-v4_final.pdf
UCLA Samueli Faculty Join New Effort in Next-Generation Electronic Technologies | UCLA Samueli School Of Engineering
The VAST lab is pleased to be part of the Center for Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory (PRISM) under the JUMP 2.0 program led by UC San Diego in collaboration from Professors Jason Cong and Yizhou Sun from UCLA. The UCLA research focuses on developing novel compilation and programming support for cloud-scale in-memory and in-storage acceleration in distributed and disaggregated settings, with the goal of enabling the design of accelerators of arbitrary-size with “unlimited” high-bandwidth memories connected to computational storage with “unlimited” capacity (via disaggregation) to support intelligent memory and storage (IMS) systems; and showcasing transformative innovations in IMS systems on data-intensive grand challenge. Please see UCLA Engineering announcement for more details:
Congratulations for receiving the 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award at ASP-DAC 2023
Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong and his former PhD students Guojie Luo and Bingjun Xiao and former postdoc Kelly Tsota for receiving the 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award from the 28th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC'2023) for their work "Optimizing Routability in Large-Scale Mixed-Size Placement” presented at ASP-DAC’2013 in Yokohama, Japan in January 2013. This is the third paper from Prof. Cong’s group receiving the the 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award at ASP-DAC. ASP-DAC, started in 1995, is the largest conference in Asia and South-Pacific regions on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) area for VLSI and systems. The paper can be accessed from the IEEE Xplore at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6509636
UCLA VAST Lab congratulates its former members Prof. Sung Kyu Lim and Prof. Zhiru Zhang for election to IEEE Fellows
Sung Kyu Lim
for contributions to electronic design automation and tradeoff for 3-dimensional integrated circuits
Zhiru Zhang
for contributions to field-programmable gate array high-level synthesis and accelerator design
Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE selects a small group of recipients for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation. Sung Kyu and Zhiru, congratulations for this outstanding achievement!
Prof. Jason Cong Delivered a Keynote Speech at ICCAD’2022
Prof. Jason Cong delivered a keynote speech "Democratizing IC Designs and Customized Computing” at the 2022 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) on Monday, Oct. 31, 2022 in San Diego, CA. His talk covered the decade-long effort of his group on enabling software programmers to design efficient customized accelerators.
The full presentation is available at https://ucla.box.com/s/8yx0m0v1wtobn0io87jg4xh4sw0fculp
YouTube link for the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlqjymTcLdI&list=PLp5Yn4AjauyHmVzOV3C-ZldRLlyLjc4_R&index=5&t=44s
ICCAD is the premier forum to explore the new challenges, present leading-edge innovative solutions, and identify emerging technologies in the electronic design automation research areas. ICCAD covers the full range of CAD topics – from device and circuit-level up through system-level, as well as post-CMOS design. ICCAD has a long-standing tradition of producing a cutting-edge, innovative technical program and this year is its 41st edition.
Prof. Jason Cong Delivered a Keynote Speech at MICRO’2022
Prof. Jason Cong delivered a keynote speech "Democratizing Customized Computing” at MICRO’22 on Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2022 in Chicago. His talk covered the latest research on automated accelerator synthesis and customized computing on FPGAs, ranging from microarchitecture guided optimization, such as automated generation of highly optimized systolic arrays and stencil computation engines, to more general source-to-source transformation based on graph-based neural networks and meta learning, and finally to latency-insensitive system-level integration. His concluding remarks invite a community-wide effort in this direction. The full presentation is available at https://ucla.box.com/s/gi8ltm8h5jl4vk1bj1nqx6hxenlkpiay.
The IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture® is the premier forum for presenting, discussing, and debating innovative microarchitecture ideas and techniques for advanced computing and communication systems. This symposium brings together researchers in fields related to microarchitecture, compilers, chips, and systems for technical exchange on traditional microarchitecture topics and emerging research areas.
VAST LAB AT DAC 2022
During July 10th and 14th, Prof. Jason Cong and members of the UCLA VAST attended the DAC 2022 conference and participated in a wide range of activities, including presenting three research papers and a tutorial, moderating a panel on the future of EDA, co-organizing the Road4NN workshop, and presenting three four papers in the Ph.D. Forum and Young DAC Fellow programs. Some of the VAST lab alumni also had a reunion before DAC. Here are some highlights with photos.
Prof. Cong was awarded the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal at the DAC opening session.
Prof. Cong hosted a research panel “What are the big opportunities in the next renaissance of EDA?”, with guest panelists including Sankar Basu, Timothy Green, Prith Banerjee, Jan Rabaey, Tim Cheng, and Jayanthi Pallinti.
Prof. Cong presented “Democratizing Customized Computing with Automated Accelerator Synthesis” at the special research session on “New Perspectives in High-Level Synthesis”; he also presented in a tutorial with Daniel Tan on “Qubit Mapping and Scheduling: Gap Analysis and Optimal Solutions” as par to the half-day tutorial on “Scalable Design-Program-Compilation Optimizations for Quantum Algorithms: Using Quantum Neural Network as a Case Study”
Linghao Song presented his paper “Serpens: A High Bandwidth Memory Based Accelerator for General-Purpose Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication”
Neha, Stephen and Suhail presented at the DAC Young Fellow Program
At the DAC Ph.D. Forum, Licheng Guo presented his Ph.D. thesis “Co-optimization High-Level Synthesis and Physical Design for Rapid Timing Closure of Larg-Scale FPGA Designs”
Atefeh presented her work “Automated Accelerator Optimization Aided by Graph Neural Networks”
The VAST lab and Hanrui Wang from MIT had a pleasant dinner together.
Daniel and Prof. Cong presented a session ‘Qubit Mapping and Scheduling: Gap Analysis and Optimal Solutions’ inside the tutorial ‘Scalable Design-Program-Compilation Optimizations for Quantum Algorithms’.
New NSF Award on Automating High Level Synthesis via Graph-Centric Deep Learning
The team led by Professors Jason Cong and Yizhou Sun from the CS Department were recently awarded $1.2M from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the project entitled “High Level Synthesis via Graph-Centric Deep Learning”.
Domain-specific accelerators (DSAs) have shown to offer significant performance and energy efficiency over general-purpose CPUs to meet the ever increasing performance needs. However, it is well-known that the DSAs in field-programmable gate-arrays (FPGAs) or application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are hard to design and require deep hardware knowledge to achieve high performance. Although the recent advances in high-level synthesis (HLS) tools made it possible to compile behavioral-level C/C++ programs to FPGA or ASIC designs, one still needs to have extensive experience in microarchitecture optimizations using pragmas and code transformation to the input program, which presents a significant barrier to a typical application domain-expert or software developer to design a DSA. Even worse, evaluating each HLS design candidate is time consuming, which makes it very difficult to perform manual design iteration or automated exploration. The proposed project addresses these problems by developing a fully automated framework for evaluating and optimizing the microarchitecture of a DSA design without the invocation of the time-consuming HLS tools. It represents the input C/C++ program as one or a set of graphs with the proper data flow and control flow information, including auto-inserted optimization directives (pragmas), and then makes use of the latest advances in graph-based machine learning (ML) and ML-driven optimizations to quickly evaluate each solution candidate and guide the optimization process. The goal of this project is to enable a typical software programmer to be able to design highly efficient hardware DSAs, with the quality comparable to those designed by experienced circuit designers.
Licheng Guo won the Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award from UCLA CS Department
Licheng Guo was selected as one of the four winners of the 2022 Outstanding Graduate Student Research Awards by the UCLA CS department. Licheng is currently a fifth-year Ph.D. student under the supervision of Prof.Jason Cong. He received his bachelor's degree from Zhejiang University. His research focuses on the co-optimization of high-level synthesis and physical design to improve the achievable frequency and reduce the compile time. His research was recognized by two Best Paper Awards in FPGA 2021 and FPGA 2022. In addition, the algorithm proposed in his DAC'20 paper has been realized in the commercial Vitis HLS compiler from AMD/Xilinx and the artifacts from his FPGA'22 paper have been part of the RapidWright framework from AMD/Xilinx. His projects have been highlighted by the EE Journal, the SRC newsletter, and the ACM official Twitter account.
Best Paper Award at FPGA 2022 and Two Inductions to the FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame
Congratulations to VAST Lab members Licheng Guo and Prof. Cong, together with collaborators from AMD/Xilinx and Cornell, Ghent University for winning the Best Paper Award at the 2022 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Array for the paper “RapidStream: Parallel Physical Implementation of FPGA HLS Designs” by Licheng Guo, Pongstorn Maidee, Yun Zhou, Chris Lavin, Jie Wang, Yuze Chi, Weikang Qiao, Alireza Kaviani, Zhiru Zhang, and Jason Cong.
Also, Congratulations to Prof. Cong and VAST Lab alumni Zhiru Zhang, Karthik Gururaj, and Deming Chen, together with other collaborators, for the two papers inducted to the Class 2022 FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame: “An Efficient and Versatile Scheduling Algorithm Based On SDC Formulation" by Jason Cong and Zhiru Zhang published at the 2006 Design Automation Conference, and “FCUDA: Enabling Efficient Compilation of CUDA Kernels onto FPGAs" by Alexandros Papakonstantinou, Karthik Gururaj, John A. Stratton, Deming Chen, Jason Cong, and Wen-Mei Hwu published in the 2009 Symposium of Application-Specific Processors.
Prof. Jason Cong giving the Vision Address at the 35th International Conference on VLSI Design
Prof. Jason Cong gave the Vision Address at the 35th International Conference on VLSI Design entitled "Democratize IC Designs and Customized Computing" on February 28, 2022 (PST).
YouTube link for the talk:
Congratulations to VAST Lab Alumni Prof. David Pan for Election to ACM Fellow!
Congratulations to Prof. David Pan for being elected to ACM Fellow for "For contributions to electronic design automation, including design for manufacturing and physical design”.
Dr. Pan graduated from the UCLA Computer Science Department in December 2000 with Outstanding Ph.D. Award. His PhD thesis was "Interconnect Synthesis and Planning for High-Performance IC Designs” under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. He received the 2009 UCLA Engineering Distinguished Young Alumnus Award and was elected to an IEEE Fellow in 2014 and a SPIE Fellow in 2017. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and holds the Silicon Laboratories Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering.
https://www.acm.org/media-center/2022/january/fellows-2021
Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong for receiving the 2022 IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal
Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong for receiving the 2022 IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal “For fundamental contributions to electronic design automation and FPGA design methods.” The IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal is a science award presented by the IEEE for outstanding contributions to the microelectronics industry. The medal is named in honour of Robert N. Noyce, the founder of Intel Corporation. He was also renowned for his 1959 invention of the integrated circuit. The medal is funded by Intel Corporation and was first awarded in 2000. The past winners include TSMC Founder and CEO Morris Chang, Intel CEO Craig Barrett, and most recently AMD CEO Lisa Su.
https://samueli.ucla.edu/ucla-engineering-professor-jason-cong-receives-2022-ieee-noyce-medal/
Prof. Cong giving a keynote speech at ISVLSI 2021
Prof. Cong gave a keynote speech entitled “Layout Synthesis for Quantum Computing: Gap Analysis and Optimal Solution” at the 2021 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI) on Thursday, July 8, 2021.
YouTube link for the talk:
Link to ISVLSI Keynote speakers:
http://www.eng.ucy.ac.cy/theocharides/isvlsi21/keynotes.html
Prof. Cong giving a keynote speech at IPDPS’21
Prof. Cong gave a keynote speech entitled From Parallelization to Customization – Challenges and Opportunities at the 2021 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) on Thursday, May 20, 2021.
About IPDPS
IPDPS is an international forum for engineers and scientists from around the world to present their latest research findings in all aspects of parallel computation. In addition to technical sessions of submitted paper presentations, the meeting offers workshops, tutorials, and commercial presentations & exhibits. IPDPS represents a unique international gathering of computer scientists from around the world. Now, more than ever, the IPDPS community prizes this annual meeting as a testament to the strength of international cooperation in seeking to apply computer science technology to the betterment of the global village.
Jie Wang won the Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award by UCLA CS Department
Jie Wang was selected as one of the four winners of the 2021 Outstanding Graduate Student Research Awards by UCLA CS department.
Jie is currently a sixth-year PhD student under the supervision of Prof.Jason Cong. He received his bachelor degree from Tsinghua University. His research focuses on compilation support and architecture exploration of systolic array architectures. In his latest work published in FPGA 2021, he developed an open-source systolic array compiler, AutoSA (https://github.com/UCLA-VAST/AutoSA), that is capable of generating high-performance systolic arrays on FPGAs within hours.
Link to Jie Wang's personal website: https://cadlab.cs.ucla.edu/~jaywang/
Best Paper Award at the 29th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA 2021)
Computer Science Professor Jason Cong and his students Licheng Guo, Yuze Chi, Jie Wang, Jason Lau, and Weikang Qiao, in collaboration with Professor Zhiru Zhang and his student Ecenur Ustun at the Cornell University, have received the Best Paper Award from the 29th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA 2021) for their paper "AutoBridge: Coupling Coarse-Grained Floorplanning and Pipelining for High-Frequency HLS Design on Multi-Die FPGAs” in March 2021. AutoBridge addresses an important problem of how to raise the level of design abstraction while still achieving high frequency designs. makes important contributions to improving the timing quality of HLS compilation techniques. It introduces an effective methodology by coupling coarse-grained floorplanning with high-level synthesis (HLS) to enable interconnect pipelining. AutoBridge improves the clock frequency by 2X on average when tested on a wide range of large-scale designs on multi-die FPGAs.
The ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays is the premier conference for the presentation of advances in all areas related to FPGA technology. Among the papers accepted this year, the program committee nominated three papers, which were reviewed by another confidential selection committee. The selection committee unanimously declared AutoBridge to be the final winner. A total of 135 papers were submitted to FPGA’2021, among those 26 were accepted, and one was selected for the Best Paper Award.
Congratulations to Linghao Song for Receiving the EDAA Outstanding Dissertations Award 2020
Linghao was selected as one of the four winners of EDAA Outstanding Dissertations Award 2020. In the dissertation, he focused on the architecture for deep learning and graph processing.
Linghao is a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong, and his current research project is FPGA acceleration for graph-based machine learning. He received his Ph.D. degree from Duke working with Prof. Yiran Chen and Prof. Hai Li.
Details can be found at https://www.edaa.com/awards.html.
Congratulations to Atefeh Sohrabizadeh for Winning Cadence Women in Technology Scholarship
Atefeh Sohrabizadeh is one of 15 winners of the Cadence Women in Technology Scholarship. Atefeh joined the Ph.D. program in UCLA Computer Science Program in Fall 2018. Her research interests lie in parallel architecture and programming. She is involved in research projects focusing on customized computing for deep learning applications and raising the abstraction level for FPGA design and was the lead author of the FlexCNN (FPGA'20) and AutoDSE (pre-print available on arXiv).
For the full story, please visit https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/can/posts/cadence-awards-31-diversity-scholarships-to-students-in-technology?pifragment-1788=2
Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong for Election to the Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors
The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) announced Tuesday its 2020 class of fellows, including four UCLA Samueli School of Engineering faculty members. There are now 18 UCLA Samueli-affiliated NAI fellows.
Election to the NAI fellowship is the highest professional distinction exclusive for inventors and innovators from academic institutions. This year, 175 fellows joined this prestigious cohort in recognition of their accomplishments in “creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.”
For the full story, please visit: https://samueli.ucla.edu/four-ucla-engineering-researchers-named-to-national-academy-of-inventors/
Prof. Cong appointed as the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence in the Samueli School of Engineering
Professor Jason Cong has been appointed as the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence in the Samueli School of Engineering. Prof. Cong joined the UCLA faculty in 1990. He is the Director of Center for Domain-Specific Computing (funded by an NSF Expeditions in Computing Award) and the Director of VLSI Architecture, Synthesis, and Technology (VAST) Laboratory. From 2005 to 2008, he served as the chair of the UCLA Computer Science Department. His research interests include electronic design automation, customized computing, quantum computing, and highly scalable algorithms. He is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE and a member of National Academy of Engineering.
Link to UCLA Computer Science News:
https://www.cs.ucla.edu/professor-jason-cong-appointed-as-the-volgenau-chair-for-engineering-excellence-in-the-samueli-school-of-engineering/
UCLA Computer Scientists Set Benchmarks to Optimize Quantum Computer Performance
Two UCLA computer scientists have shown that existing compilers, which tell quantum computers how to use their circuits to execute quantum programs, inhibit the computers’ ability to achieve optimal performance. Specifically, their research has revealed that improving quantum compilation design could help achieve computation speeds up to 45 times faster than currently demonstrated.
For more information, please visit: https://samueli.ucla.edu/ucla-computer-scientists-set-benchmarks-to-optimize-quantum-computer-performance/.
Congratulations to Dr. Young-kyu Choi for Receiving 2020 Cisco Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award
Dr. Young-kyu Choi has received 2020 Cisco Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award for his exceptional research contribution during his PhD studies. He is one of four recipients selected for the honor. His PhD work, "Performance Debugging Frameworks for FPGA High-Level Synthesis", provides automated performance estimation, simulation, and optimization framework that helps fix the performance bottleneck of FPGA HLS designs.
After successfully defending his dissertation last year, Dr. Choi has continued to work in the VAST lab as a Postdoctoral Scholar. In addition to improving his performance debugging work, he is also working on providing automated high-level design support for FPGA acceleration with emphasis on HBM-based platforms and Bayesian Networks.
Link to Dr. Choi's dissertation: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1f19x5nc
Link to Dr. Choi's CV: http://cadlab.cs.ucla.edu/~ykchoi/
Photo left to right: Prof. William Hsu, Dr. Young-kyu Choi, Prof. Jason Cong, Prof. Tony Nowatzki, Prof. Miryung Kim (disseration committee)
UCLA is selected as one of the four world-class universities by Xilinx to establish Adaptive Computer Research Clusters
Xilinx Teams with Leading Universities Around the World to Establish Adaptive Compute Research Clusters to spearhead novel research into all areas of adaptive compute acceleration.
The cluster at UCLA will focus on energy-efficient computing, customized computing for big-data applications and highly scalable algorithms. Prof. Jason Cong, Director for the Center for Customizable Domain-Specific Computing at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, will lead the effort. Prof. Cong has been at the forefront of FPGA technology research for more than 30 years.
For more information, please visit https://www.xilinx.com/news/press/2020/xilinx-teams-with-leading-universities-around-the-world-to-establish-adaptive-compute-research-clusters.html
Congratulations to Dr. Zhe Chen for Receiving the 2019 Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research
Zhe was selected as one of eight recipients of the 2019 Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research. This award was established in 1998 to recognize the important contributions that postdoctoral scholars make to UCLA’s research mission.
Zhe devotes his postdoctoral research efforts to using customizable computing to advance the real-time closed-loop neurofeedback for the brain-machine interface, under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong from Computer Science Department and Prof. Hugh T. Blair from Psychology Department.
More information can be found at https://www.postdoc.ucla.edu/chancellors-award-for-postdoctoral-research/
Photo: Left to Right: Dean of the Graduate Division Robin L. Garrell, Zhe Chen, Vice Chancellor for Research Roger M. Wakimoto
Prof. Cong Giving Keynote Speech at ASP-DAC '2020
Prof. Jason Cong gave a keynote speech entitled “Design Automation for Customizable Computing” at ASP-DAC’2020 on Jan. 20, 2020 in Beijing China. ASP-DAC 2020 is the 25th annual international conference on VLSI design automation in Asia and South Pacific region, one of the most active regions of design and fabrication of silicon chips in the world. The conference provides the Asian and South Pacific CAD/DA and Design community with opportunities of presenting recent advances and with forums for future directions in technologies related to Electronic Design Automation (EDA).
2019 IEEE/ACM William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award
Computer Science Professor Jason Cong, together with his co-authors Zhenyuan Ruan (former student, now at MIT), and Tong He (former student, now at Google), have received the 2019 IEEE/ACM William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award for their paper "Analyzing and Modeling In-Storage Computing Workloads On EISC — An FPGA-Based System-Level Emulation Platform” published in the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in Nov. 4-6, 2019 at Denver, CO.
Presented at ICCAD each November, this Award is jointly sponsored by ACM/SIGDA, IEEE/CASS, and IEEE/CS. Papers are selected by the ICCAD Program Committee through a rigorous and multi-stage review process. This Award is given in the memory of William J. McCalla, for his contributions to ICCAD and his CAD technical work throughout his career. This year ICCAD had 394 submissions and accepted 94 papers. Only 2 papers out of them received the best paper award.
About ICCAD: Jointly sponsored by IEEE and ACM, ICCAD has been the premier forum to explore emerging technology challenges in electronic design automation (EDA), present leading-edge R&D solutions, and identify future research directions. The ICCAD scope has also been adapted and expanded to address emerging technology, design, and automation challenges including those in AI, IoT, security, among others.
Computer science professor honored by the Semiconductor Industry Association
Jason Cong, Distinguished Chancellor’s Professor of computer science in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has won the 2019 University Research Award from the Semiconductor Industry Association, in collaboration with the Semiconductor Research Corporation.
For more information, please visit http://newsroom.ucla.edu/dept/faculty/computer-science-professor-honored-by-the-semiconductor-industry-association
Prof. Cong giving IEEE CEDA Distinguished Lecture at UIUC
Prof. Cong delivered the IEEE CEDA distinguished lecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign on Monday, September 23, 2019. The talk title is "Democratize Customizable Computing".
2019 Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award
Computer Science Professor Jason Cong, together with his co-authors Dr. Chen Zhang (former visiting student, now at Microsoft Research Asia), Prof. Guangyu Sun (Peking University), Prof. Zhenman Fang (former postdoc, now faculty member at Simon Fraser Univ.), Peipei Zhou (current PhD student), and Peichen Pan (Falcon Computing), have received the 2019 Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award from the IEEE Council for Design Automation (CEDA) for their paper "Caffeine: Towards Uniformed Representation and Acceleration for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks” published in the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design (CAD) in Oct. 2018. Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award seeks to recognize the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on CAD in the two calendar years preceding the award. The selection process starts with nomination of best paper candidates by the current Associate Editors of the IEEE TCAD. Among the papers published over the preceding two years, papers receiving highest citations or highest downloads are automatically nominated for review and voting by the entire editorial board. This year the editorial board nominated five papers, and another nine papers are auto-nominated. After the voting, top five papers are reviewed by a confidential review committee before a final selection is made. The selection committee unanimously agreed to declare two papers to be co-winners. This award is recognized at the Design Automation Conference in Las Vegas on June 4, 2019.
Postdoc Zhe Chen received 2019 UCLA Bioscience Innovation Day Pearl Cohen Poster Award
Congratulations to Zhe Chen, under the supervision of Professors Jason Cong and Tad Blair, for receiving the Pearl Cohen Poster Award as the 2nd Place Winner in the Precision Medicine and Imaging Section in the 2019 UCLA Bioscience Innovation Day conference.
UCLA Bioscience Innovation Day is the premier bio-innovation conference in Los Angeles. Market leaders in the field gather to promote awareness of the growing bioscience entrepreneurial ecosystem at UCLA and to foster partnerships with the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and life science industries. For more information, please visit https://tdg.ucla.edu/bioscience-innovation-day-2019.
2019 CESASC Achievement Award
Prof. Jason Cong was one of three recipients of the 2019 CESASC Achievement Award, which was given on Sunday, April 14, 2019 at the 57th Annual Convention of Chinese-American Engineers and Scientists Association of Southern California (CESASC). The CESASC is a non-profit professional organization founded in 1962, with the mission to promote and advocate the best interests, aspirations, and professional excellence of Chinese-American engineers and scientists, and to provide career and educational enhancement opportunities, technical exchange, fellowship and community service. Past CESASC Achievement Award include Nobel Laureates, industry leaders, heads of institutions, and top policy makers, such as Dr. Steve Chu (朱棣文), Dr. Chen Ning Yang (楊振寧), Dr. Chen-Dau Lee (李政道), Yuan T. Lee (李遠哲), Dr. Samuel C. C. Ting (丁肇中), Dr. David Ho (何大一), Dr. Shu Chien (錢煦), Dr. Henry C. Lee (李昌鈺), Ms. Elaine L. Chao (趙小蘭), plus many more. More information about CESASC and the award is available at http://www.cesasc.org.
2019 Google Faculty Research Award
Prof. Jason Cong is one of the recipients of the Google Faculty Research Award (FRA) for 2019. Google FRA program is focused on funding world-class technical research in Computer Science, Engineering, and related fields. Among 910 proposals from 40 countries and over 320 universities submitted this year, 158 projects were selected for funding this year.
Best Paper Award at FPGA'19
Computer Science Professor Jason Cong and coauthors Yi-Hsiang Lai, Yuze Chi, Yuwei Hu, Jie Wang, Cody Hao Yu, Yuan Zhou, and Prof. Zhiru Zhang has received the Best Paper Award at the 27th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays held in Seaside, CA, February 24-26, 2019. Their paper, "HeteroCL: A Multi-Paradigm Programming Infrastructure for Software-Defined Reconfigurable Computing” results from a close collaboration between Prof. Zhang’s group at Cornell and Prof. Cong’s group at UCLA. HeteroCL is a multi-paradigm programming infrastructure for heterogeneous platforms integrating CPUs and FPGAs. HeteroCL not only provides a clean abstraction that decouples the algorithm from compute/data customization, but it also captures the interdependence among them. Moreover, HeteroCL incorporates spatial architecture templates including systolic arrays and stencil with dataflow architectures. HeteroCL can help developers to focus more on designing efficient algorithms rather than being distracted by low-level implementation details.
The ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays is the premier conference for presentation of advances in all areas related to the FPGA technology, including FPGA architecture, FPGA circuit design, CAD for FPGAs, high-level abstractions and tools for FPGAs, FPGA-based and FPGA-like computing engines, as well as applications and design studies. This year's Best Paper Award is selected from a total of 161 submissions.
Deming Chen is elected to IEEE Fellow
Congratulations to Deming Chen, a former member of Prof. Cong's lab, for being elected to IEEE fellow "for contributions to FPGA high-level synthesis."
The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000 plus members in 160 countries, the association is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. Recognizing the achievements of its members is an important part of the mission of the IEEE. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation.
Prof. Cong giving keynote at the Computing in the 21st Century Conference & Asia Faculty Summit on MSRA’s 20th Anniversary
Prof. Cong delivered a keynote speech at the 2018 Computing in the 21st Century Conference (21CCC) & Asia Faculty Summit hosted by Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) in junction with the MSRA 20-Year Anniversary Celebration on November 6, 2018 held in Beijing, China. The title of Prof. Cong's speech is "Automating Customizable Computing – Democratizing Accelerator Designs at the Edge and in the Cloud."
Video link:
https://www.msra.cn/zh-cn/news/video/21ccc-2018-video-jason-cong
Conference link:
Best Paper Award at ISLPED’18
The paper is co-authored by Zhe Chen, Andrew Howe, Hugh T. Blair, and Jason Cong with the title "CLINK: Compact LSTM Inference Kernel for Energy Efficient Neurofeedback Devices.” received the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED’18) held in Seattle, WA, USA during July 23-25, 2018. Dr. Zhe Chen is a postdoctoral researcher jointly supervised by Prof. Jason Cong from the Computer Science Department and Prof. Tad Blair from the Psychology Department. This paper presents a highly energy-efficient electroencephalography (EEG) signal processing accelerator for neurofeedback devices using the long short-term memory (LSTM) based neural network model. It has potential applications for treating neurological diseases such as Parkinsonism and epilepsy using neurofeedback deep brain stimulation.
The International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED) is the premier forum for presentation of innovative research in all aspects of low power electronics and design, ranging from process technologies and analog/digital circuits, simulation and synthesis tools, system-level design and optimization, to system software and applications. It is co-sponsored by the IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society and the ACM SIGDA. This year two papers are selected for the Best Paper Award from 150 submissions.
Jason Cong and Song-Chun Zhu: Center for Research in Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory (CRISP)
We are pleased to announce that Professors Jason Cong (CS) and Song-Chun Zhu (CS and Statistics) are part of the University of Virginia’s new $27.5M Center on Research in Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory (CRISP)—one of six Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP) centers nationwide that are managed by the Semiconductor Research Corporation with cost-sharing from DARPA. Each research center will examine a different challenge in advancing microelectronics—a field that is crucial to the U.S. economy and its national defense. The six JUMP centers are located at the University of Virginia, UC Santa Barbara, Carnegie Mellon, Purdue, University of Michigan and Notre Dame.
UV’s CRISP Center will bring together researchers from eight universities in an effort to remove the separation between memories that store data and processors that operate on that data—a separation that has been part of all mainstream computing architectures since 1945 when von Neumann first outlined how programmable computers should be structured. Unfortunately, that technology led to today's “memory wall” in which data access has become a major performance bottleneck. Professors Cong and Zhu will work with CRISP researchers and become instrumental in removing that bottleneck.
Prof. Cong giving distinguished lecture at the ECE Department of Northeastern University
Prof. Cong delivered a distinguished lecture at the ECE Department of Northeastern University in Boston, MA on February 21, 2018. The title of Prof. Cong's speech is "Computing Near the End of Moore's Law".
The link of the video is :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/51308wjrid894vk/Lecture-Jason%20Cong.mp4?dl=0
Congratulations to Dr. Zhiru Zhang for the Rising Professional Achievement Award from the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Zhiru received his PhD from UCLA in 2007 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. His research investigates new algorithms, methodologies, and tools to extend the frontiers of design automation for high-performance and energy-efficient computer systems. His research has been recognized with the UCLA Rising Professional Achievement Award (2018), a DARPA Young Faculty Award (2015), the IEEE CEDA Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award (2015), an NSF CAREER Award (2015). Prior to joining Cornell, Zhiru co-founded AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc. with Prof. Jason Cong, Dr. Yiping Fan, and Dr. Jing Chang. AutoESL was acquired by Xilinx in 2011. Its high-level synthesis tool is now known as Vivado HLS, widely used in the industry.
The Rising Professional Achievement Award honors the early career achievements of alumni who are under the age of 40, with impactful accomplishments in academia, industry or entrepreneurship; contributions to the engineering profession; a demonstrated commitment to mentorship; and notable service to the community and the profession.
UCLA and Cornell Research Team Win Award from Intel and the National Science Foundation for Heterogeneous Computing Research Effort.
Please read the full press at the following link:
Prof. Cong giving keynote at CNCC'2017
Prof. Cong delivered a keynote speech at the 2017 China National Computer Congress (CNCC) on October 27, 2017 held in Fuzhou, China. The title of Prof. Cong's speech is "Computing Near the End of Moore’s Law". Prof. Cong is awarded "Distinguished Contribution Award" by the China Computer Federation (CCF) on CNCC.
Slides available here: http://vast.cs.ucla.edu/~cong/slides/cncc2017_final_JasonCong.pdf
Related News: http://www.ccf.org.cn/c/2017-09-27/614976.shtml
http://www.ccf.org.cn/c/2017-10-30/617832.shtml
Prof. Cong's induction to the National Academy of Engineering
Prof. Jason Cong was inducted to the National Academy of Engineering on Oct. 8, 2017 in Washington DC for pioneering contributions to application-specific programmable logic via innovations in field-programmable gate array synthesis.
The New Ph.D -- Dr. Di Wu
Congratulations to the new PhD, Dr. Di Wu under supervision of Prof. Jason Cong! His thesis title is "Scaling Acceleration-Rich Systems for Big-data Analytics". After graduation, he will continue with Falcon Computing Solutions, Inc. in Los Angeles, CA.
Prof. Cong giving keynote at IISWC'2017
Prof. Cong delivered a keynote speech at the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC'17) on October 2, 2017 held in Seattle, WA. The title of Prof. Cong's speech is "Characterization and Acceleration for Genomic Sequencing and Analysis". The talk covers background on genomic processing pipeline, workload characterization and optimization and acceleration developed in the group.
Slides available here:
http://vast.cs.ucla.edu/~cong/slides/IISWC_keynote_JasonCong.pdf
Best Paper Award at MEMSYS 2017: Authors Cong, Fang, Gill, Javadi, Reinman
Computer Science Department authors Jason Cong, Zhenman Fang, Michael Gill, Farnoosh Javadi, and Glenn Reinman have received a Best Paper Award at MEMSYS 2017 (2-5 October, Washington DC) for their recent paper AIM: Accelerating Computational Genomics through Scalable and Noninvasive Accelerator-Interposed Memory (https://memsys.io/). An abstract of this paper follows:
Computational genomics plays an important role in health care, but is computationally challenging as most genomic applications use large data sets and are both computation-intensive and memory-intensive. Recent approaches with on-chip hardware accelerators can boost computing capability and energy efficiency, but are limited by the memory requirements of accelerators when processing workloads like computational genomics. In this paper we propose the accelerator-interposed memory (AIM) as a means of scalable and noninvasive near-memory acceleration. To avoid the high memory access latency and bandwidth limitation of CPU-side acceleration, we design accelerators as a separate package, called AIM module, and physically place an AIM module between each DRAM DIMM module and conventional memory bus network. Experimental results for genomic applications confirm the benefits of AIM. Due to the much lower memory access latency and scalable memory bandwidth, our non-invasive AIM achieves much better performance scalability than the CPU-side acceleration when the memory system scales up.
Customizable Accelerated Computing Will Be Used in Brain Research
This collaborative work involves a team of researchers from several areas of UCLA. Professor Jason Cong and Professor Tad Blair from UCLA’s Brain Research Institute are refining the wireless miniscope to give it built-in, energy-efficient computing capability for real-time feedback and analysis.
Please read about this ground-breaking research on the UCLA Newsroom website:
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/8-3-million-grant-from-national-science-foundation-will-help-ucla-spread-technology-behind-mini-microscope
CDSC Will Develop Customizable Computing Technology for Augmented Reality Funded by Intel and NSF
The full press release is available at: http://engineering.ucla.edu/augmented-reality-making-it-secure-fast-efficient-and-resilient/
https://www.cs.ucla.edu/augmented-reality-making-it-secure-fast-efficient-and-resilient/
The New Ph.D -- Dr. Muhuan Huang
Congratulations to the new PhD, Dr. Muhuan Huang under supervision of Prof. Jason Cong! Her thesis title is "Resource and Data Management in Accelerator-Rich Architectures". Muhuan graduated on December 2016 and joined Google, Inc. in Mountain View, CA after graduation.
Peng Wei for 2016-2017 Symantec Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award
Congratulations to Peng Wei (advisor: Prof. Jason Cong) for receiving the 2016-2017 Symantec Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award.
Bingjun Xiao for 2016 EDAA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award
Congratulations to Bingjun Xiao (PhD’2015, advisor, Jason Cong), whose dissertation "Communication Optimization for Customizable Domain-Specific Computing", has been awarded the 2016 EDAA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award. The award was presented at the conference DATE 2017 – Design, Automation & Test in Europe, on Mar 28 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The full press release of EDAA is available at http://www.edaa.com/press_releases/EDAA_Award_2016_Results.pdf
EDAA is a non-profit association. Its purpose is to operate for educational, scientific and technical purposes for the benefit of the international electronics design and design automation community. The Association, in the field of design and design automation of electronic circuits and systems, promotes a series of high quality technical international conferences and workshops across Europe and cooperates actively to maintain harmonious relationships with other national and international technical societies and groups promoting the purpose of the Association. EDAA is the main sponsor of DATE, the premier Design, Automation and Test Conference and Exhibition in Europe.
ACM/SIGDA TCFPGA initiated the FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame program at the symposium
In celebrating the 25th anniversary of the FPGA Symposium, which took place February 22nd through 24th in Monterey, California, ACM/SIGDA TCFPGA initiated the FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame program at the symposium. The paper entitled “FlowMap: An Optimal Technology Mapping Algorithm for Delay Optimization in Lookup-Table Based FPGA Designs” by Prof. Jason Cong and his former PhD student Dr. Eugene Ding published in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 1994, was inducted to the inaugural class of the Hall of Fame (http://hof.tcfpga.org). The endorsement letter is available at http://hof.tcfpga.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/flowmap1994_class2017.pdf.
About ACM FPGA: The ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, held annually in Monterey, is the premiere forum for the presentation of advances in all areas of FPGA technology. http://www.isfpga.org/.
UCLA Pioneers elected to National Academy of Engineering
Three faculty members of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science – Jason Cong and George Varghese of Computer Science, and Behzad Razavi of Electrical Engineering (pictured left to right above) – have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, among the highest honors that can be accorded to an American engineer. The academy announced the 2017 class of 84 members and 22 foreign members on February 8.
With the election of Cong, Varghese and Razavi, UCLA Engineering has 35 affiliated faculty members who are members of the National Academy of Engineering.
Jingsheng Jason Cong, Distinguished Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science, was recognized by the academy “for pioneering contributions to application-specific programmable logic via innovations in field programmable gate array (FPGA) synthesis.”
George Varghese, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science, was recognized by the academy “for network algorithmics that make the Internet faster, more secure, and more reliable.”
Behzad Razavi, Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical Engineering, was recognized by the academy “for contributions to low-power broadband communication circuits.”
For more details, please visit http://engineering.ucla.edu/ucla-pioneers-in-customized-computing-communication-circuits-networking-elected-to-national-academy-of-engineering/
For Peking University press release, please visit http://news.pku.edu.cn/xwzh/2017-02/19/content_296744.htm
For World Journal press, please visit http://www.worldjournal.com/4846224/article-叢京生獲選國家工程學院院士/
Prof. Cong Received ASP-DAC'17 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award
Prof. Jason Cong and his former students Guojie Luo, Jie Wei, and Yan Zhang received received the 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award at 2017 Asia and South-Pafacific Design Automation ASP-DAC'17 in Tokyo, Japan on Jan. 17, 2017 for their paper entitled "Thermal-Aware 3D IC Placement Via Transformation” published in ASP-DAC in 2007. Prof. Cong’s group also received another 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award at ASP-DAC’2015 two years ago.
ASP-DAC 2017 is the twenty-second annual international conference on VLSI design automation in Asia and South Pacific region, one of the most active regions of design and fabrication of silicon chips in the world. The conference aims at providing the Asian and South Pacific CAD/DA and Design community with opportunities of presenting recent advances and with forums for future directions in technologies related to Electronic Design Automation (EDA). ASP-DAC cultivates and promotes interactions and presentations of novel ideas among EDA researchers/developers and system/circuit/device-level designers. It is attended by scientists, engineers, researchers, and students who are interested in theoretical and practical aspects of VLSI design and design automation worldwide.
ASP-DAC'17 website: www.aspdac.com/aspdac2017/
Dr. Zhenman Fang is selected as one of the four Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) inaugural fellows
Dr. Zhenman Fang, advised by Professor Cong, is selected as one of the four Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) inaugural fellows. Dr. Fang is researching on how new computer architectures can impact DNA sequencing technology.
The IDRE fellowship program was initiated as a mechanism to build a cohort of UCLA postdoctoral scholars and early career researchers and engage them in the IDRE community. Fellowship applicants were nominated by faculty sponsors and the recipients were selected by faculty from IDRE’s Executive Committee.
More information is available at https://idre.ucla.edu/featured/idre-selects-inaugural-fellows
Dr. Zhenman Fang presented the Blaze demo at the C-FAR annual review
Dr. Zhenman Fang presented the Blaze demo on Dec 6, 2016 at the C-FAR (Center for Future Architectures Research) annual review hosted at University of Michigan. The Blaze demo won the 3rd place out of 49 demos from 15 top universities. Congratulations to all Blaze team members: Muhuan Huang, Di Wu, Cody Yu, Zhenman Fang, Matteo Interlandi, Tyson Condie and Jason Cong.
More information about the C-FAR is avaialble at https://www.futurearchs.org/.
Prof. Cong giving keynote at the Symposium on Emerging Trends in Computing, 2016
Prof. Cong delivered a keynote speech at the Symposium on Emerging Trends in Computing on Oct. 10, 2016 in Montreux, Switzerland. The title of Prof. Cong's speech is "Customizable Computing: Options and Opportunities”. The objective of this symposium is to gather about 100 experts from the computing domain, to hear presentations on cutting edge themes and to participate in panel discussions. Participation is by invitation only. Videos of the technical presentations and panels will be made available to students for educational purposes. The symposium is funded by the Swiss Government initiative nano-tera.ch to promote international scientific exchanges.
More information about the conference is available at http://si.epfl.ch/symposium2016.
Prof. Cong giving keynote at ACA'2016
Prof. Jason Cong delivered a keynote speech at the The 11th Conference on Advanced Computer Architecture (ACA '2016) on August 23, 2016 held in Weihai, China. The title of Prof. Cong's speech is "“Customizable Computing — From Single-chip to Datacenters”.
Prof. Cong giving keynote at IEEE NAS’2016
Prof. Jason Cong delivered the opening keynote speech at the The 11th IEEE International Conference on Networking, Architecture, and Storage (NAS 2016) on August 8, 2016 held at Long Beach, California. NAS provides a high-quality international forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss cutting-edge research on networking, high-performance computer architecture, and parallel and distributed data storage technologies. The title of Prof. Cong’s speech is "Customizable Computing at Datacenter Scale”. More information about the conference is available at http://www.nas-conference.org/NAS-2016/index.html.
The new PhD - Dr. Yu-Ting Chen
Congratulations to new PhD, Dr. Yu-Ting Chen under supervision of Prof. Jason Cong! His thesis is "Memory System Optimizations for Customized Computing -- From Single-Chip to Datacenter". After graduation, he will join Google at Mountain View.
Congratulations to him again!
The 2016-2017 Dissertation Year Fellowship
Di Wu, advised by Professor Cong, is selected as 2016-2017 Dissertation Year Fellows by the UCLA Graduate Division. His thesis title is "Scaling Accelerator-Rich Systems for Big-Data Analytics".
The fellowship program's intention is to support the final year of graduate school at the disertation writing stage and to facilitate the start of the teaching or research appointments soon after the end of the dissertation fellowship year.
From IEEE Computer Society Announcement on Feb. 22, 2016
Dr. Jason Cong, a Chancellor’s Professor at the Computer Science Department, with joint appointment from Electrical Engineering Department of University of California, Los Angeles, has been selected to receive the 2016 Technical Achievement Award “For setting the algorithmic foundations for high-level synthesis of field programmable gate arrays”.
The IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award is given for outstanding and innovative contributions to the fields of computer and information science and engineering or computer technology, usually within the past 10, and not more than 15, years. Contributions must have significantly promoted technical progress in the field. The complete IEEE Computer Society announcement is available at https://www.computer.org/web/pressroom/cong-tech-achievement
Dr. Cong, elected to an IEEE Fellow in 2000 and ACM Fellow in 2008, is the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Circuits and System (CAS) Society Technical Achievement Award “For seminal contributions to electronic design automation, especially in FPGA synthesis, VLSI interconnect optimization, and physical design automation.” Dr. Cong is the only award recipient to receive the Technical Achievement Award from both the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE CAS.
The youtube video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAUWwjIJ_Ss
Prof. Cong gave keynote speech at ASP-DAC 2016
Prof. Jason Cong delivered a keynote speech on "Compilation for Customized Computing -- From Single-Chips to Data Centers” at the 21st Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC 2016) in Macao, China on Jan. 28, 2016. ASPDAC aims at providing the Asian and South Pacific CAD/DA and Design community, one of the most active regions of design and fabrication of silicon chips in the world, with opportunities of presenting recent advances and with forums for future directions in technologies related to Electronic Design Automation (EDA). For more information about the conference, please visit http://www.amsv.umac.mo/aspdac2016/
Prof. Cong gave keynote speech at H2RC'15 held in conjunction with SC'15
Prof Cong gave keynote speech "Datacenter-Scale Customizable Computing" at first International Workshop on Heterogeneous High-performance Reconfigurable Computing( H2RC'15) Held in conjunction with Super Computing 2015.
About H2RC'15: http://h2rc.cse.sc.edu/index.html
Prof. Cong gave keynote speech at HALO'15
Prof. Cong gave keynote speech entitled "Machine Learning on FPGAs" on November 5, 2015 at HALO’2015 (the First Workshop on Hardware and Algorithms for Learning On-a-Chip) co-located at the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD’15)
About HALO:
Machine learning algorithms, such as those for image based search, face recognition, multi-category classification, and scene analysis, are being developed that will fundamentally alter the way individuals and organizations live, work, and interact with each other. However their computational complexity still challenges the state-of-the-art computing platforms, especially when the application of interest is tightly constrained by the requirements of low power, high throughput, small latency, etc. In recent years, there have been enormous advances in implementing machine learning algorithms with application-specific hardware (e.g., FPGA, ASIC, etc.). There is a timely need to map the latest learning algorithms to physical hardware, in order to achieve orders of magnitude improvement in performance, energy efficiency and compactness. Recent progress in computational neurosciences and nanoelectronic technology, such as resistive memory devices, will further help shed light on future hardware-software platforms for learning on-a-chip. The overarching goal of this workshop is to explore the potential of on-chip machine learning, to reveal emerging algorithms and design needs, and to promote novel applications for learning. It aims to establish a forum to discuss the current practices, as well as future research needs.
Alumni Prof. Deming Chen wins Best Paper Award at ICCAD'15
Alumni Prof. Deming Chen wins Best Paper Award at ICCAD'15, Austin, TX.
The paper is W. Zuo, W. Kemmerer, J. B. Lim, L.-N. Pouchet, A. Ayupov, T. Kim, K. Han, and D. Chen, “A polyhedral-based SystemC modeling and generation framework for effective low-power design space exploration,” Proceedings of IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, November 2015
ICCAD is the premier forum to explore emerging technology challenges, present cutting-edge R&D solutions, record theoretical and empirical advances, and identify future roadmaps for design automation. Continuing a long tradition, ICCAD continues to be the home for the ACM/SIGDA CADathlon and Student Research Competition, several CAD contests, including the IEEE CEDA CAD Contest, and a remarkable set of workshops on design automation for analog and mixed-signal circuits, EDA research on learning on a chip, design for dark silicon era, variability modeling and characterization, and formal verification.
Alumni Prof. Zhiru Zhang received the first IEEE CEDA Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award
VAST Lab alumni Prof. Zhiru Zhang at Cornell University received the first IEEE CEDA Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award on Nov. 2 at the opening session of ICCAD’2015.
The IEEE CEDA Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award honors an individual who has made innovative and substantial technical contributions to the area of Electronic Design Automation in the early stages of his or her career.
http://ieee-ceda.org/awards/ernest-s-kuh-early-career
Google Faculty Research Award for 2015
Prof Jason Cong is one of the recipients of the Google Faculty Research Award for 2015. The one-year award supports the work of world-class, permanent faculty members at top universities around the world. with the aim of advancing cutting-edge research in computer science, engineering and related fields.
Book "Customizable Computing" Published
At the conclusion of the “Customizable Domain-Specific Computing” project funded by the NSF Expeditions in Computing program in 2009, Prof. Cong, Prof. Reinman and their graduate students in the Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC) published a book in the series of Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. This book presents an overview and introduction of the recent developments on energy-efficient customizable architectures, including customizable cores and accelerators, on-chip memory customization, and interconnect optimization. In addition to a discussion of the general techniques and classification of different approaches used in each area, it also highlights and illustrates some of the most successful design examples in each category and discuss their impact on performance and energy efficiency. A large body of the research covered in the book were obtained during the course of the Expeditions in Computing project.
Prof Cong's Keynote Speech at 2015 SOCC
Prof. Cong gave a keynote speech entitled as "High-Level Synthesis and Beyond -- from Datacenters to IoTs" at SOCC'15, the 28th IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference, Beijing, China on September 9, 2015.
About SOCC'15: In its 27 years of history, the IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC) has been the premier forum for sharing advances in system-on-chip (SoC) technologies, designs, tools, test, verification and applications. Held at changing locations in the USA, Europe and Asia, SOCC is attracting researchers and engineers from all over the world to exchange knowledge, share experiences and establish collaborations with colleagues.
SOCC'15 website: www.ieee-socc.org/
Prof Cong Received ASPDAC Ten-Year Retrospestive Most Influential Paper Award
research paper by Jason Cong, a Chancellor’s Professor in UCLA’s Computer Science Department, and his former doctoral student, Yan Zhang, was selected as the 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper in the 2015 Asia South-Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASPDAC). The award for the paper, “Thermal-Driven Multilevel Routing for 3-DICs,” was presented at the opening ceremony of ASPDAC’15 on Jan. 20, in Chiba/Tokyo, Japan.
Cong, on faculty at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, is the director of Center for Domain-Specific Computing, co-director of UCLA/Peking University Joint Research Institute in Science and Engineering and co-director of the VLSI CAD Laboratory. His research interests include synthesis of VLSI circuits and systems, programmable systems, novel computer architectures, nano-systems and highly scalable algorithms. He has over 350 publications in these areas and has won seven best paper awards and the 2011 ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electric Design Automation.
He was elected to an IEEE Fellow in 2000 and ACM Fellow in 2008. He is the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Circuits and System Society Technical Achievement Award "for seminal contributions to electronic design automation, especially in FPGA synthesis, VLSI interconnect optimization, and physical design automation."
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/dept/faculty/jason-cong-wins-10-year-retrospect...
Prof Cong Received ICCAD Ten-Year Retrospestive Most Influential Paper Award
Congratulations to Jason Cong and coauthors Jie Wei and Yan Zhang. Their 2004 paper, A Thermal-Driven Floorplanning Algorithm for 3D ICs, has received this year's ICCAD Ten-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award. ICCAD (International Conference on Computer-Aided Design) judged this paper to be the "most influential on research and industrial practice in computer-aided design of integrated circuits over the ten years since its original appearance at ICCAD."
Prof Cong Received Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from UIUC
Prof. Jason Cong is selected as a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The award is given on Oct. 24, 2014 during the CS @ ILLINOIS 50th Anniversary Celebration.
The information of the event and other awardees is available at
http://cs.illinois.edu/news/cs-illinois-50th-anniversary-celebration
Prof Cong's Keynote Speech at 22nd IPIP/IEEE VLSI-SoC
Prof. Jason Cong is giving the keynote speech entitled "Design Automation Beyond High-Level Synthesis" at the 22nd IPIP/IEEE VLSI-SoC 2014 on Oct. 6, 2014.
VLSI-SoC 2014 is the 22nd in a series of international conferences sponsored by IFIP TC 10 Working Group 10.5, IEEE CEDA and IEEE CASS, which explores the state-of-the-art in the areas that surround Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) and System-on-Chip (SoC).
Previous conferences have taken place in Edinburgh, Trondheim, Tokyo, Vancouver, Munich, Grenoble, Gramado, Lisbon, Montpellier, Darmstadt, Perth, Nice, Atlanta, Rhodes, Florianópolis, Madrid, Hong Kong, Santa Cruz and Istanbul.
The purpose of VLSI-SoC is to provide a forum to exchange ideas and showcase research as well industrial results in EDA, design methodology, test, design, verification, devices, process, systems issues and application domains of VLSI and SoC.
The conference website is http://www.vlsi-soc.com
Aug 2014: Keynote Speech in ISLPED 2014 by Prof. Cong
In 14th IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED) 2014, La Jolla, CA, Professor Cong gave a keynote speech entitled "Accelerator-Rich Architectures — From Single-chip to Datacenters".
The International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED) is the premier forum for presentation of recent advances in all aspects of low power design and technologies, ranging from process and circuit technologies, to simulation and synthesis tools, to system level design and optimization.
July 2014: Alumni Prof. David Pan Appointed as "Engineering Foundation Professor" at UT Austin
Congratulations to David Pan for the appointment "Engineering Foundation Professor” at UT Austin. Last year David got Earl N. and Margaret Brasfield Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Engineering.
David Z. Pan received his Ph.D. degree (with honor) from the VAST Lab (formerly the VLSI CAD Lab) in Computer Science from University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2000. In 2003, He joined Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin.
July 2014: Awarded of $3 million by NSF and Intel to address health care needs
In partnership with Intel Corporation, NSF announced the first InTrans award of $3 million to a team of researchers who are designing customizable, domain-specific computing technologies for use in healthcare. The work could lead to less exposure to dangerous radiation during x-rays by speeding up the computing side of medicine. It also could result in patient-specific cancer treatments.Led by the University of California, Los Angeles, the research team includes experts in computer science and engineering, electrical engineering and medicine from Rice University and Oregon Health and Science University. The team comes mainly from the Center of Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC), which was supported by an NSF Expeditions in Computing Award in 2009.
In the project, the researchers looked beyond parallelization (the process of working on a problem with more than one processor at the same time) and instead focused on domain-specific customization, a disruptive technology with the potential to bring orders-of-magnitude improvements to important applications. Domain-specific computing systems work efficiently on specific problems - in this case, medical imaging and DNA sequencing of tumors - or a set of problems with similar features, reducing the time to solution and bringing down costs.The InTrans program not only advances important fundamental research and integrates it into industry, it also benefits society by improving medical imaging technologies and cancer treatments, helping to extend lives.
For details, please see NSF and UCLA press releases:
Taking great ideas from the lab to the fab
First NSF InTrans Grant Awarded to UCLA
February 2014: Inivted Demo at Xilinx ETS 2014 Academic Exhibition
In the Xilinx Emerging Technology Symposium (ETS) on Feburary 13rd, 2014, the UCLA team led by Professor Jason Cong are invited to demo FPGA acceleration on a 3-D medical imaging pipeline and an end-to-end system level automation flow called CMOST (Customization, Mapping, Optimization, Scheduling and Transformation).
October 2013: Professor Jason Cong: Keynote Speaker at ICCD 2013
Professor Jason Cong has been selected as the keynote speaker at the 31st IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD). Jason's speech, entitled "Computing Beyond Processors", was presented on October 8th, 2013.
June 2013: Professor Jason Cong Receives DAC Prolific Author Award--Club 40
During the 50th DAC award banquet on June 5, 2013, Prof. Jason Cong received an DAC Prolific Author Award -- Club 40, which are given to authors with 40 or more papers in the 50-year history of the Design Automation Conference (DAC). Five other researchers in the Club 40 are Robert K. Brayton, Yao-Wen Chang, Kwang-Ting (Tim) Cheng, Andrew B. Kahng, and Martin D. F. Wong.
Professor Jason Cong: Keynote Speaker at ISCAS 2013
Professor Jason Cong presented the keynote speech, Computing Beyond Processors, at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) held 19-23 May 2013 in Beijing, China. ISCAS is the world's premier networking forum for leading researchers in the highly active fields of theory, design, and implementation of circuits and systems. ISCAS 2013 is being attended by over 900 researchers worldwide.
June, 2013: Best Paper Award in 2013 ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES).
Congratulations to Professor Jason Cong and his research group.
The ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) has presented a Best Paper Award to Jason Cong, W. Jiang, B. Liu and Y. Zou for their paper Automatic Memory Partitioning and Scheduling for Throughput and Power Optimization, 16(2), April 2011. This is the third time that Professor Cong's research group has received a TODAES Best Paper Award. Other awards were received in 2005 and 2012.
April, 2013 : Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award -- Guojie Luo .
Congratulations to Dr. Guojie Luo who received the 2013 ACM SIGDA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award in electronic design automation. His thesis is on "Placement and Design Planning for 3D Intergrated Circuits". The award will be presented at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) on June 4th in Austin, TX.
December, 2012 : New Ph.D. -- Bin Liu .
Congratulations to Dr. Bin Liu who received his Ph.D. degree in December 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "High-Level Synthesis for Nanoscale Integrated Circuits".
September, 2012 : New Ph.D. -- Chunyue Liu .
Congratulations to Dr. Chunyue Liu who received his Ph.D. degree in September 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Architecture Support for Customized Domain-Specific Computing". After graduation, Dr. Liu has joined Google at Kirkland, WA.
June, 2012 : New Ph.D. -- Yi Zou.
Congratulations to Dr. Yi Zou who received his Ph.D. degree in June 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Coprocessor Acceleration for Domain-Specific Computing".
June, 2012 : Best Paper Award in 2012 ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES).
Professor Jason Cong is a recipient of the 2012 ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) Best Paper Award for the journal entitled "Behavior-Level observability Analysis for Operation Gating in Low-Power Behavioral Synthesis," with co-authors from UCLA Bin Liu and Rupak Majumdar, and Zhiru Zhang from AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc. The award was presented on June 5, 2012 at the Design Automation Conference held in San Francisco, CA.
March, 2012 : Professor Cong: Keynote Speaker at SASIMI 2012.
Professor Cong served as the keynote speaker at The 17th Workshop on Synthesis And System Integration of Mixed Information technologies (SASIMI 2012) which was held on March 8, 2012 at Oita, Japan. Prof. Cong's talk was titled "Parallelization, Customization and Automation”.
Nov, 2011 : Professor Cong: Award presenter at the 2011 Phil Kaufman Award Banquet.
Professor Cong gave the presentation at the Phid Kaufman Award dinner in honor of Professor C. L. David Liu, recipient of the 18th Phil Kaufman Award by EDAC and CEDA, for his distinguished contributions to Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Professor Liu is a distinguished engineer and educator, and an astute business leader. The Phil Kaufman Award honors individuals who have had demonstrable impact on the field of electronic design through contributions in EDA.
The video of Prof. Cong's presentation is available here (starting from slides 18).
Sep, 2011 : Professor Cong served as keynote speaker at the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP 2011).
Professor Cong gave the keynote speech "Era of Customization and Specialization" at the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP 2011). The conference was held in Santa Monica, CA, 11-14 September 2011.
June, 2011 : Professor Cong and Dr. Eugene Ding receive ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation 2011 .
Congratulations to Professor Jason Cong and his former Ph.D. student Dr. Eugene Ding (now with Xilinx). They received this year's ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation at the opening session of the 48th Design Automation Conference. The award was given for pioneering work on technology mapping for FPGAs that has made a significant impact on the FPGA research community and industry, as evidenced by a paper published at least ten years prior to the award. Prof. Cong and Dr. Ding are honored for their paper "FlowMap: An Optimal Technology Mapping Algorithm for Delay Optimization in Lookup-Table Based FPGA Designs" , IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design, vol 13, no. 1, pp. 1-12, January 1994. (Link to UCLAToday, photo)
May, 2011 : Best Paper Award in the 19th Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM 2011).
A team from UCLA and UIUC has won a Best Paper Award for the collaborative Multilevel Granularity Parallelism Synthesis on FPGAs. The paper, authored by A. Papakonstantinou, Y. Liang, J. Stratton, K. Gururaj, D. Chen, W. M. Hwu, and J. Cong, was selected out of 120 submissions to the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines. This work (code-named FCUDA-II) offers an advanced modeling and search engine in the multi-granularity parallelism design space to map CUDA kernels to FPGAs. It offers up to 7x speedup in terms of performance compared to the original FCUDA work (which received the Best Paper Award at SASP 2009).
April, 2011 : UCLA-led team with Guojie Luo, Bingjun Xiao and Jason Cong (advisor) won the Second Prize in the routability-driven placement contest@ISPD 2011.
The annual design contest at this year's 20th annual International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD 2011) concentrated on the global routing congestion problems that plague lithographic placement algorithms below the 65-nanometer node. Second place went to "mPL11" developed by a team from the lab of Prof. Jason Cong at the University of California at Los Angeles. The researchers include Guojie Luo, Kalliopi Tsota (Purdue), and Bingjun Xiao. (Link to EE Times)
February, 2011 : Engineering entrepreneurs: Taking university research to the public.
AutoESL was founded directly by faculty and graduate students from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Using the technology licensed from UCLA, AutoESL found a critical niche in developing tools that reduce design time and improve the quality of integrated circuit design, and in less than five years, the company became an acquisition target for Xilinx. "I believe that university spinoffs involving the developers of the original technology are the best way to bridge such gaps." - said by Jason Cong, Chancellor's Professor in computer science at UCLA Engineering and a co-founder of AutoESL, worked with UCLA Engineering graduate students in developing the technology. (Link to UCLA Newsroom)
November, 2010 : Bin Liu and Yi Zou won the First Prize of CADathlon@ICCAD.
PhD students Bin Lin and Yi Zou of Prof. Jason Cong in the Computer Science Department won the First Prize of CADathlon @ ICCAD, which took place on Sunday, Nov. 9, 2010 prior to ICCAD'2010. The Second Prize were shared by two teams from Univ. of Michigan and UC Berkeley. (Link to CADathlon @ ICCAD, photo)
July, 2010 : Professor Jason Cong is the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Circuits and System (CAS) Society Technical Achievement Award.
Prof. Jason Cong is the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Circuits and System (CAS) Society Technical Achievement Award. This award honors the individual whose exceptional technical contributions to a field within the scope of the CAS Society have been consistently evident over a period of years. The citation of the award for Prof. Cong reads “ For seminal contributions to electronic design automation, especially in FPGA synthesis, VLSI interconnect optimization, and physical design automation”. Prof. Cong will receive the award at the IEEE International SoC Conference on September 27. 2010. (Link to CAS newsletter, photo)
June, 2010 : New Ph.D. -- Kirill Minkovich
Congratulations to Dr. Kirill Minkovich who received his Ph.D. degree in April 2010 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Logic Synthesis for Nanometer IC Technologies". After graduation, Kirill will work at HRL Laboratories as a postdoc.
December, 2009 : New Ph.D. -- Wei Jiang
Congratulations to Dr. Wei jiang who received his Ph.D. degree in November 2009 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Program Analysis and Transformation for ESL Synthesis". After graduation, Wei will join Google Inc. at Santa Monica.
August, 2009 : NSF awards UCLA $10 million to create customized computing technology
The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has been awarded a $10 million grant by the National Science Foundation's Expeditions in Computing program to develop high-performance, energy efficient, customizable computing that could revolutionize the way computers are used in health care and other important applications. Professor Jason Cong will be the Director of the new UCLA Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC), which will oversee the research.Research being conducted by the CDSC is a collaborative effort among faculty from UCLA's engineering school, medical school and applied mathematics program, as well as faculty from Rice University, Ohio State University and UC Santa Barbara. In particular, Professors Jens Palsberg, Miodrag Potkonjak and Glenn Reinman from the UCLA CS Dept will also be involved in the Center. Congratulations to Professor Cong and all the faculty involved in the center
January, 2009 : Professor Jason Cong named ACM fellow "For contributions to Electronic Design Automation"
Congratulations to Professor Jason Cong for being named an ACM fellow "For contributions to electronic design automation". This year ACM has recognized 44 of its members for their contributions to computing technology that have generated a broad range of innovations for industry, commerce, entertainment, and education. Quoting from the ACM website:
"These men and women are the inventors of technology that impact the way people live and work throughout the world," said ACM President, Professor Dame Wendy Hall. "Their selection as 2008 ACM Fellows offers us an opportunity to recognize their dedicated leadership in this dynamic field, and to honor their contributions to solving complex problems, expanding the impact of technology, and advancing the quality of life for people everywhere."
February, 2008 : Best Paper Award in International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)
A joint CS/EE paper authored by Frank Chang, Jason Cong, Adam Kaplan, Mishali Naik, Glenn Reinman, Eran Socher, and Rocco Tam has received the best paper award from the 14th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) held February 16-20, 2008. This year's symposium received 161 papers, accepted 31, and gave only one best paper award.
This paper, "CMP Network-on-Chip Overlaid With Multi-Band RF-Interconnect," explores the use of multi-band RF interconnect with signal propagation at the speed of light to provide shortcuts in a many-core network-on-chip (NOC) mesh topology.
January, 2008 : New Ph.D. -- Guoling Han
Congratulations to Dr. Guoling Han who received his Ph.D. degree in January 2008 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Synthesis Techniques for Application-Specific Processor-Based Design". After graduation, Guoling will join AutoESL Design Technologies in Los Angeles.
January, 2008 : SCDsource article about UCLA VLSI CAD LAB research on RF-interconnect
SCDsource mentioned Jason Cong and CADLab in their article entitled, "Multi-band RF interconnect speeds network-on-chip"
December, 2007 : UCLA Newsroom article about UCLA VLSI CAD LAB research
UCLA Newsroom mentioned Jason Cong and CADLab in their article entitled, "UCLA scientists working to create smaller, faster integrated circuits"
November, 2007 : SolidState Technology article about UCLA VLSI CAD LAB research on 3D IC designs
SolidState Technology mentioned Jason Cong and CADLab in their article entitled, "Moore's Law to head z-ward?"
April, 2007 : Zhiru Zhang received 2006-2007 Outstanding Ph.D. Award
Congratulations to Dr. Zhiru Zhang for receiving the Outstanding Ph.D. Award from the UCLA Computer Science Department for the academic year 2006-2007. The CS department designates one Ph.D. and one MS recipient as the outstanding Ph.D. and MS student for our department for the year. The award will be formally announced in June 2007 at the Commencement of the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
March, 2007 : New Ph.D. -- Zhiru Zhang
Congratulations to Dr. Zhiru Zhang who received his Ph.D. degree in March 2007 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Behavior-Level Scheduling and Planning for Nanometer IC Designs". After graduation, Zhiru will join AutoESL Design Technologies in Los Angeles.
December, 2006 : New Ph.D. -- Joey Yizhou Lin
Congratulations to Dr. Joey Y. Lin who received his Ph.D. degree in December 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Physical Synthesis Techniques For FPGA Optimization". Joey is currently with Magma Design Automation Inc., Los Angeles. [photos]
December, 2006 : New Ph.D. -- Yiping Fan
Congratulations to Dr. Yiping Fan who received his Ph.D. degree in December 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Interconnect Oriented Microarchitectures and Resource Binding in Behavioral Synthesis". After his graduation, Yiping will join AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc., Los Angeles. [photos]
September, 2006 : New Ph.D. -- Min Xie
Congratulations to Dr. Min Xie who received his Ph.D. degree in September 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Constraint-Driven Large-scale Circuit Placement Algorithms". After his graduation, Min will join KBC Financial Products USA Inc., New York.
September, 2006 : New Ph.D. -- Yan Zhang
Congratulations to Dr. Yan Zhang who received her Ph.D. degree in September 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. Her thesis is on "Multilevel Routing for Higher Degree of Circuit Integration". After her graduation, Yan will join Magma Design Automation Inc., Los Angeles.
June, 2006 : New Ph.D. -- Kenton Nang Keung Sze
Congratulations to Dr. Kenton N. K. Sze who received his Ph.D. degree in June 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Tony Chan and Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Multilevel Optimization for VLSI Circuit Placement". After his graduation, Kenton will join Magma Design Automation Inc., San Jose.
February, 2006: EE Times article about UCLA VLSI CAD LAB research
The recent published paper "Optimality study of logic synthesis for LUT-based FPGAs" by Jason Cong, Kirill Minkovich (FPGA 2006) was the subject of an article that appeared on the EE times magazine in its online edition for the 20th of February.
October, 2005 : Zhiru Zhang Received Phi Tau Phi Scholarship Award
Zhiru Zhang received the 2005-2006 Phi Tau Phi Scholarship Award which is given each year by the West America Chapter of the Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society to four undergraduate or graduate students in the southern California in recognition of their academic achievements and scholarly contributions. The award consists of a certificate and a cash prize of $1,000. Zhiru is the first person in Prof. Cong's group who has received this award since its establishment in 1995.
August, 2005 : New Ph.D. -- Deming Chen
Congratulations to Dr. Deming Chen who received his Ph.D. degree in August 2005 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Design and Synthesis for Low-Power FPGAs". After his graduation, Deming will join ECE Department at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor. [photos]
June, 2005 : Best Paper Award in ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES)
Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong, Dr. Xin Yuan, and Hui Huang for receiving the 2005 Best Paper Award of the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) of the following paper. TODAES selects one paper each year for the best paper award, and this award was presented at the openning session at the opening session of the 2005 Design Automation Conference (DAC'2005) on June 14, 2005. [photo] J. Cong, H. Huang, and X. Yuan, "Technology Mapping and Architecture Evaluation for k/m-Macrocell-based FPGAs," ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), Vol. 10, pp. 3 - 23, January 2005 The paper presents a novel FPGA architecture based on k/m-macrocells, with in-depth quantitative architecture design and evaluation against widely used LUT-based FPGAs. It also presents efficient mapping algorithms for such architectures.
![[photo]](http://cadlab.cs.ucla.edu/labalbum/dac05/TODAES-best-paper.jpg){kind=link}
May, 2005 : New Ph.D. -- Ashok Jagannathan
Congratulations to Dr. Ashok Jagannathan who received his Ph.D. degree in May 2005 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Microarchitecture Evaluation and Optimization in Interconnect-Limited Technologies". After his graduation, Ashok will join Intel India, Bangalore. [photos]
April, 2005 : Best paper award at ISPD 2005
The paper by T.Chan, J. Cong, and K. Sze entitled "Multilevel Generalized Force-directed Method for Circuit Placement" received the Best Paper Award at the 2005 International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD'2005), held during April 4-6, 2005 in San Francisco, CA. ISPD is sponsored by ACM/SIGDA and with technical cosponsorship from IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, and is the premier forum for exchanging research results and ideas on VLSI physical design automation . Each year, ISPD selects a single paper for the best paper award. The technical program of ISPD'2005 is available at www.ispd.cc.
March, 2005 : New Ph.D. -- Michail Romesis
Congratulations to Dr. Michail Romesis who received his Ph.D. degree in March 2005 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Automatic Design Planning and Exploration for VLSI Systems". After his graduation, Michail will join Magma Design Automation in the Netherlands.
January, 2005: EE Times article about UCLA VLSI CAD LAB research
The recently published paper "Fast Floorplanning by Look-Ahead Enabled Recursive Bipartitioning" by Jason Cong, Michail Romesis and Joseph Shinnerl (ASPDAC 2005) was the subject of an article that appeared on the EE times magazine in its online edition for the 31st of January.
January, 2005 : Magma Donation to UCLA VLSI CAD LAB
The new year brings new tools to the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science's integrated circuits and systems research. Magma Design Automation donated licensed Blast software programs to computer science professor Jason Cong for use in his very-large-scale integration (VLSI) computer-aided design (CAD) lab. http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/news/2005/magma.html
December, 2004 : New Ph.D. -- Michael Chen
Congratulations to Dr. Gang Chen who received his Ph.D. degree in Dec 2004 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Unified Synthesis Techniques for High Performance FPGA Designs". Since 2003, Michael works for Magma Design Automation in Los Angeles, California.
April, 2004 : Ashok Jagannathan Received Intel Fellowship
Congratulations to Ashok Jagannathan who received the highly competitive and prestigious Intel Fellowship. This competitive fellowship program awards 1-year fellowships to PhD candidates doing work in fields related to Intel's business and research interests. Fellowships are available at selected U.S. universities. Approximately 35 fellowships are awarded annually.
August, 2003 : New Ph.D. -- Xin Yuan
Congratulations to Dr. Xin Yuan who received her Ph.D. degree in Aug 2003 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. Her thesis is on "Multi-level Coarse Placement for Physical Hierarchy Generation". After her graduation, Xin joined IBM EDA in Burlington Vermont.
May, 2003 : Michail Romesis Received the Dimitris Chorafas Foundation Award
Michail Romesis received the 2003 Dimitris Chorafas Foundation Award which is given each year to three graduate students in the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences for their outstanding research and academic performance. The award consists of a certificate and a cash prize of $4,000. Michail is the fifth person in Prof. Cong's group who has received this award since its establishment in 1995. The four previous winners from this group were Cheng-Kok Koh (1996), Lei He (1997), Songjie Xu (1999) and David Pan (2000).
April, 2003: Best poster award at UCLA research review
The poster from the SOC group (Yiping Fan, Guoling Han, Xun Yang, Zhiru Zhang) with the title "Architecture and Synthesis for Multi-Cycle Communication" won the best individual poster award at the annual UCLA Computer Science Research Review. This year's research review featured more than 70 posters from all the research groups of the Computer Science Department.
April, 2003: EE Times article about UCLA VLSI CAD LAB research
The recently published paper "Optimality, Scalability and Stability Study of Partitioning and Placement Algorithms" by Jason Cong, Michail Romesis and Min Xie (ISPD 2003) was the subject of an article that appeared on the EE times magazine in its online edition for the 10th of April.
February, 2003: UCLA VLSI CAD LAB on the cover of EE Times
The recently published paper "Optimality and Scalability Study of Existing Placement Algorithms" by Chin-Chih Chang, Jason Cong, and Min Xie (ASPDAC 2003) was the subject of an article that appeared in the cover of the EE times magazine in its online edition for the 5th of February.
May, 2002: Tianming Kong received 2001-02 Outstanding Ph.D. Award
Congratulations to Tim Kong for receiving the Outstanding Ph.D. Award from the UCLA Computer Science Department for the academic year 2001-2002.
Sept, 2001: New Visiting Researcher -- Mr. Hidetoshi Matsuoka from Fujitsu Laboratories
Hidetoshi Matsuoka joined the research group of Prof. Jason Cong as visiting researcher from Fujitsu Laboratories. He will be with UCLA for a year. Matsuoka received his M.S. degree in electronic engineering in 1989. His research interest is multilayer area routing.
Sept, 2001: New graduate student -- Min Xie
Min Xie joined the research group of Prof. Jason Cong in September 2001. Min received his M.S. degree from Tsinghua University, China. Currently he works on multilayer gridless area routing.
Sept, 2001: New graduate student -- Zhiru Zhang
Zhiru Zhang joined the research group of Prof. Jason Cong in September
2001. Zhiru received his B.S. degree from Peking University, China.
His current research emphasis is on system-on-a-chip(SoC).
Sept, 2001: New graduate student -- Yiping Fan
Yiping Fan joined the research group of Prof. Jason Cong in September
2001. Yiping received his M.S. degree from Tsinghua University, China.
Currently he works on SOC.
Sept, 2001: Prof. Jason Cong received the SRC Technical Excellence Award Recipient for Year 2000.
In a letter dated on August 24, 2001 from Dr. Dinesh Mehta, Vice President, Business Operations & Strategic initiatives to Prof. Walter Karplus, Dean of UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, it says
"It is a great pleasure to inform you that Professor Jason Cong has been selected to be the SRC Technical Excellence recipient for the year 2000. Dr. Cong's work in the area of Interconnect Estimation, Planning and Synthesis for Sub-Micron Designs has significantly enhanced the productivity of the U.S. semiconductor industry. Dr. Cong will receive $5,000 in recognition of his achievements.
The SRC Technical Excellence Award is given annually to researchers who, over a period of years, have demonstrated creative, consistent contributions to the field of semiconductor research, who are ground breakers and leaders in their fields, and who are regarded as model collaborators with their colleagues in the SRC member community.
The SRC operates globally to provide a competitive advantage to its member companies as the world's premier research management consortium delivering relevantly educated technical talent and early research results. The SRC plans and manages a program of basic and applied university research on behalf of its participating members.
We are very proud of the contributions made by Jason and his students and wish them continued success."
June, 2001: New SRC Contract for Prof. Jason Cong's Group
Jason Cong's research group was awarded another contract from Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) on "Synthesis and Optimization under Physical Hierarchy". The specific tasks in this project include physical hierarchy generation, behavioral-level and logic-level synthesis under physical hierarchy and applications to synthesis with timing closure, micro-architecture evaluation and incremental system designs.
June, 2001: Second alumni reunion meeting of Professor Jason Cong at DAC
During this year's Design Automation Conference in Las Vegas Jason Cong's group and alumni held a reunion meeting. Seven people from UCLA attended the meeting and six former students/visitors. This is intended to be an annual event occurring at every DAC. Alumni interested in attending the event should contact us at michail@cs.ucla.edu with his/her latest contact information.
June, 2001: Songjie Xu and David Pan received 2000-01 Outstanding Ph.D. Award
Congratulations to Songjie Xu and David Pan for receiving the Outstanding Ph.D. Award from the UCLA Computer Science Department for the academic year 2000-2001. The awards were formally announced on June 16, 2001 at the Commencement of the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
June, 2001: Dr. Wangning Long completed his post-doctoral research at UCLA
Dr. Wangning Long has completed his post-doctoral research at UCLA with Prof. Jason Cong. His research at UCLA was on SPFD and its application to rewiring. In June 2001, he presented his work on "Theory and Algorithm for Global SPFD-Based Rewiring" at the 2001 International Workshop of Logic Synthesis . He is now with the Aplus Design Technologies, Inc. as a Senior Engineer.
May, 2001: New post-doctoral researcher - Xun Yang
Dr. Xun Yang joined the research group of Prof. Jason Cong as a post-doctoral researcher. Xun received his Ph.D. degree from the Beijing Institute of Technology in computer science. He also worked at Tsinghua University as a post-doctoral researcher from March 1999 to April 2001. His current interests include hardware/software co-design and co-verification.
May, 2001: New visiting scholar -- Zhong Chen
Dr. Zhong Chen joined the research group of Prof. Jason Cong as a visiting scholar. Dr. Chen is a Professor at the department of computer science and technology at Beijing University, China since 1995. He received his Ph.D. from the Beijing University in computer science. His research interests include security information based on system-on-a-chip, software-hardware co-design and embedded system technology.
March, 2001: New NSF Award on System-On-A-Chip
The proposal to NSF on Giga-Scale System-On-A-Chip Designhas been funded. This award will support the establishment of an International Research Center on System-On-A-Chip involving 7 universities in US (UCLA and UCSB), Taiwan (National Tsinghua Univ. and National Chiao Tung Univ.), and China (Peking Univ., Tsinghua Univ., and Zhejiang Univ). There will also be supports from NSC (National Science Council) in Taiwan and CNSF (Chinese National Science Foundation) in China, to be announced later this year. The research activities of the center include investigation and development of efficient SOC synthesis tools, methodologies, SOC verification, test and diagnostic technologies, and an SOC design driver that motivates and validates various synthesis, verification and test techniques developed during the course of this research project.
February, 2001: New Ph.D. -- Jie Fang
Jie Fang received his Ph.D. in February 2001 under Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis was on "Multi-Layer Gridless Detailed Routing". Jie is now a Design Engineer with Broadcom.
February, 2001: Dr. Taku Uchino has completed his term as a visiting researcher at UCLA
Dr. Taku Uchino has completed his term as a visiting researcher at UCLA and returned back to Toshiba. His research in Prof. Jason Congss group was on power modeling for interconnect planning in deep submicron designs. A major part of his research result will appear in a paper entitiled "An Interconnect Energy Model Considering Coupling Effects" at the 2001 Design Automation Conference.
December, 2000 : Prof. Jason Cong Was Elected as an IEEE Fellow
Congratulations to Prof. Jason Cong, who was elected to an Fellow of IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), a leading technical professional association of more than 350,000 individual members in 150 countries, in technical areas ranging from computer engineering, biomedical technology and telecommunications, to electric power, aerospace and consumer electronics, among others. In a letter issued by Dr. Bruce A. Eisenstein, the President of IEEE, it states that "Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for one of the Institute's most prestigious honors, election to IEEE Fellow." Dr. Jason Cong was elected to an IEEE Fellow at the meeting of the IEEE Board of Directors on December 3, 2000 with the following citation: "For contributions to the computer-aided design of integrated circuits, especially in physical design automation, interconnect optimization, and synthesis of field-programmable gate-arrays."
November, 2000 : New Ph.D. -- David (Zhigang) Pan
Congratulations to Mr. David (Zhigang) Pan who received his Ph.D. degree in November 2000 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Interconnect synthesis and planning for high-performance IC designs". He is now with the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights, New York, where he is a Research Staff Member.
September, 2000 : New Ph.D. -- Songjie Xu
Congratulations to Ms. Songjie Xu who received her Ph.D. degree in September 2000 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. Her thesis is on "Synthesis for High-Density and High-Performance SRAM-Based FPGAs". She is now with the Aplus Design Technologies, Inc. in Los Angeles, California, where she is a founding member of the R&D team and Senior Engineer.
September, 2000: New graduate student -- Ashok Jagannathan
Ashok Jagannathan joined the research group of Prof. Jason Cong in September 2000. Ashok received his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Chicago. The title of his thesis was "Applications of Shortest Path Algorithm to VLSI Layout Problems". His current research area is on interconnect optimization.
September, 2000: New graduate student -- Yan Zhang
Yan Zhang joined the research group of Prof. Jason Cong in September 2000. Yan received her M.S. degree from Tsinghua University, China. Currently she works on multilayer general area gridless routing.
September, 2000 New graduate student -- Yizhou Lin
Yizhou Lin joined the research group of Prof. Jason Cong in September 2000. Yizhou received a B.S. degree from Tsinghua University, China. His current research emphasis is on logic synthesis and optimization.
August, 2000: New graduate student -- Deming Chen
Deming Chen joined the research group of Prof. Jason Cong in August 2000. Deming received his BS degree from the University of Pittsburgh. His current research area in on synthesis for programmable logics.
VLSI CAD in the 21st Century
"VLSI CAD in the 21st Century" is a celebraton of Prof. Cong and VLSI CAD Lab's 10th anniversary at UCLA. It also serves as the first reunion for all current and former members of Prof. Cong's research group.
The highlight of this workshop includes the keynote speech by Prof. C.L. Liu (Prof. Cong's Ph.D. advisor, who is now President of National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan) and the presentations from Prof. Cong's former Ph.D. students, who are now faculty members of major research universities, researcher of leading industrial research lab, and senior engineers of CAD companies. In addition, we will have a lot of fun events. Please browse the following program and if you have any suggestion, please let us know.
June, 2000 : New Ph.D. -- Sung-Kyu Lim
Congratulations to Sung-Kyu Lim who received his Ph.D. degree in June 2000 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. His thesis is on "Performance Driven Circuit
Partitioning". Sung came to UCLA VLSI CAD Laboratory in Fall 1995.
May, 2000 : Chang Wu and Lei He received 1999-2000 Outstanding Ph.D. Award
Lei He and Chang Wu received the 1999-2000 UCLA Computer Science Department Outstanding Ph.D. Award for their outstanding achievements during their Ph.D. study at UCLA. Dr. He is now a faculty member at Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison. Dr. Wu is now with Aplus Design Technologies, Inc. Dr. Yeanyow Hwang, a graduate from this group, was the winner of this award last year (1998-99).
May, 2000 : David Pan Received Dimitris Chorafs Foundation Award
May. 29, 2000. David Pan received the 2000 Dimitris Chorafas Foundation Award which is given each year to two graduate students in the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences for their outstanding research and academic performance. The award consists of a certificate and a cash prize of $4,000. David is the fourth person in Prof. Cong's group who has received this award since its establishment in 1995. The three previous winners from this group were Cheng-Kok Koh (1996), Lei He (1997) and Songjie Xu (1999).
October, 1999 : Congraturations to Songjie Xu
Oct. 22, 1999. Songjie Xu received the 1999 Dimitris Chorafas Foundation Award for her novel research work on technology mapping for field-programmable gate-arrays with embedded memory blocks. The Dimitris Chorafas Foundation Award is given each year to two graduate students in the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences for their outstanding research and academic performance. The award consists of a certificate and a cash prize of $2,000. Songjie is the third person in Prof. Cong's group who have received this award since its establishment in 1995. The two previous recipients were Cheng-Kok Koh (1996) and Lei He (1997).
September, 1999 : New Ph.D. -- Lei He
Lei He received his Ph.D. degree in Sept. 1999 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. Lei came to UCLA VLSI CAD Laboratory in Fall 1994. His thesis is on "Modeling and Optimization of VLSI Interconnects". He joined the Faculty of ECE Department of University of Wisconsin at Madison.
September, 1999 : New Graduate Student -- Michael (Gang) Chen
Michael enrolled in the Ph.D. program at UCLA Computer Science Department this fall and joined Prof. Jason Cong's group as a graduate student researcher. Michael received his BS degree in the Computer Science Department of Tsinghua University in the summer of 1999.
September, 1999 : New Visiting Researcher -- Dr. Taku Uchino from Toshiba
Dr. Taku Uchino joined Prof. Jason Cong's group at UCLA as visiting researcher from Toshiba Corporation. He will be with UCLA for a year and a half. Dr. Uchino received his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1993. His current research interest is power estimation in DSM technology.
August, 1999 : New Postdoc -- Dr. Wangning Long
Dr. Wangning Long joined Prof. Jason Cong's group as a post-doctoral researcher. He received his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, in July 1997. His Ph.D. thesis was on "Research on digital system testing and BDD variable ordering". He worked as a post-doctoral researcher from Sept 1997 to July 1999. His current research interest is in designing algorithms for logic synthesis and physical design automation.
August, 1999 : New Ph.D. -- Chang Wu
Chang Wu received his Ph.D. degree in Aug. 1999 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Cong. Chang came to UCLA VLSI CAD Laboratory in Winter 1995, first as a visiting scholar, later became a Ph.D. students. His thesis is on "Performance-Driven FPGA Synthesis for Sequential Circuits". He is now with Aplus Design Technologies as a Senior Engineer.
August, 1999 : NSF Workshop on System-on-a-Chip in Taiwan
An International workshop on "Challenges and Opportunities In Giga-Scale Integration for System-On-A-Chip", under the joint sponsorship of US National Science Foundation and Taiwan National Research Council, was held in Hsin-Chu, Taiwan during Aug. 25 & 26, 1999. The workshop co-organizers are Professor Jason Cong from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Professor Youn-Long Lin and Prof. C. L. Liu from Tsinghua University, Taiwan. The workshop were attended by a group of researchers, practitioners, and visionaries from universities, major silicon foundries, EDA companies, large system design houses and fabless semiconductor companies (include FPGA companies), and small IP providers. Dr. Chi-Foon Chan, President of Synopsys, delivered the keynote speech at the workshop. For workshop summary and report, please check with the workshop webpage.
August, 1999 : 1990-2000 California MICRO Award on Interconnect Planning and Optimization
California MICRO Program awarded the research project at UCLA VLSI CAD Laboratory on "Interconnect Planning and Optimization" for 1999-2000. This project is co-sponsored by Fujitsu Laboratories of America.
This project will be directed by Prof. Jason Cong.
August, 1999 : 1990-2000 California MICRO Award on FPGA Research
Aug. 1999: California MICRO Program continued its support to the research project at UCLA VLSI CAD Laboratory on "SRAM-Based FPGA Synthesis and Architecture Evaluation" for 1999-2000. This project is co-sponsored by all major PLD/FPGA vendors, including Actel, Altera, Lucent Technologies, Quickturn, Vantis, and Xilinx. This project will be directed by Prof. Jason Cong.
July, 1999: New SRC Award
July, 1999: UCLA VLSI CAD Laboratory received another award from Semiconductor Research Corporation for the project on "Nonlinear Programming for Large-Scale Circuit Placement with Complex Constraints". It is a three-year project starting July 1999. The principal investigator of the project is Prof. Jason Cong, and the co-investigators are Prof. Tony Chan (UCLA Math Department) and Prof. Joe Shinnerl (UCLA Computer Science Department). Tianming Kong is the graduate student researcher working on the project.
June, 1999 : Student Award for Yeanyow Hwang
Yeanyow Hwang received 1999 UCLA Computer Science Department Outstanding Ph.D. Award.
June, 1999 : New Contract for Prof. Jason Cong's Group
Jason Cong's research group was awarded another contract from Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) on "Nonlinear Programming for Large-Scale Circuit Placement with Complex Constraints".
April 26th, 1999 : David Z. Pan Awarded 1999 IBM Research Fellowship
David Z. Pan was awarded the prestigious IBM Research Fellowship for the 1999/2000 academic year. Only about 25 Ph.D. students in US and Canada are awarded, in all areas of interest to IBM, including electrical engineering, computer science, mathematics, physics, and related disciplines. With over 350 exceptional candidates this year, it is indeed a special honor to obtain an IBM Research Award. Congratulations to David!
April 3rd, 1999 : Congraturations to Yeanyow Hwang
Dr. Hwang has successfully completed his Ph.D. study at UCLA in March 1999. Currently Yeanyow joined Synopsys Design Compiler team.
March 24th, 1999 : Software Donation from Microsoft
Microsoft Corp. donated its software to VLSI CAD Lab at UCLA for the PC platforms. The donation package include: one Windows NT 4.0 Server, two Windows NT 4.0 Workstation with Office 97 Pro and Visual Studio 6.0. The total value of the package is $4,943.00. The donation is to encourage Universities doing research and developement on Windows NT plateform.
June, 1998 : Ph.D. Graduates go to Academic
Cheng-kok Koh and Patrick Madden both got their Ph.D. degree in June 1998. Now Dr. Koh is a professor in Purdue University, IN and Dr. Madden is a professor in State University of New York, Binghamton, NY.
November, 1998 : New Machines from Intel Corp.
Intel Corp. denated four high performance PCs to VLSI CAD lab at UCLA. The donations include:
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Two 450Mhz workstations with Pentium II Xeon processor
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Two 450Mhz computing servers with dual Pentium II processors
November, 1998 : Student Awards
David Z. Pan won "Best Paper in Session" award in TECHON'98
November, 1998 : Post-Doctoral goes to industry
Dongmin Xu goes to Cadence Design System Inc. in November, 1998.