Wong honored as ACM Fellow for electronic design automation contributions

Martin D F Wong, Edward C. Jordan Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Executive Associate Dean for the College of Engineering, has been named as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. He is honored "for contributions to the algorithmic aspects of electronic design automation (EDA)." This year's class of Fellows includes researchers, academics, and members of industry, including two CS @ ILLINOIS faculty members. Wong is also affiliated with the Coordinated Science Lab.

Wong is an expert in the area of integrated circuit design, building on the invention of fellow alumnus Jack S. Kilby (BSEE '47). Kilby joined Texas Instruments in 1958, and during his first summer there, he built the first integrated circuit in which all of the components were fabricated into a single piece of semiconductor, smaller than a paperclip. This invention has impacted modern communications, medical science, radar, entertainment and the computer industry.

Wong has continued this legacy of innovation, publishing over 450 technical papers and graduating more than 49 PhD students in the area of electronic design automation (EDA). He has won several best paper awards at premier EDA conferences. He received the 2000 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award for his work on interconnect optimization.

Wong is not only an Illinois faculty member, but also an alumnus. He received his B.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1979 and his MS degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981. He obtained his PhD degree in computer science from Illinois in 1987. He began his career at the University of Texas at Austin as a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science, and returned to Illinois as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2002.

"To be selected as a Fellow is to join our most renowned member grade and an elite group that represents less than 1 percent of ACM’s overall membership,” said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson in a news release. “The Fellows program allows us to shine a light on landmark contributions to computing, as well as the men and women whose hard work, dedication, and inspiration are responsible for groundbreaking work that improves our lives in so many ways."