Huang wins SIGDA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award

ECE ILLINOIS Research Assistant Professor Tsung-Wei Huang recently won the 2019 ACM SIGDA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation. A highly prestigious and competitive award, the ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award is given to an outstanding PhD dissertation that makes the most substantial contribution to the theory and/or application in the field of electronic design automation according to their website. 

Huang's award-winning thesis is entitled "Distributed Timing Analysis" and is a collection of his research works to solve critical challenges in timing analysis, parallel programming, and distributed computing. 

"There are many challenges. The design complexity is extremely large today and we are talking about tens of billions of components in a single chip," said Huang. "A key area is applying the power of the cloud to electronic design automation (EDA) to boost the productivity. We need a productive, secure, and scalable approach to deal with the ever-increasing design complexity. This is also one key contribution of my thesis."

Design automation has gained widespread acceptance by the VLSI circuits and systems design community. Advancement in computer-aided design (CAD) methodologies, algorithms, and tools have become increasingly important to cope with the rapidly growing complexity, higher performance and low-power requirements, and shorter time-to-market demands. 

"It's a great encouragement to me. The dissertation is a masterpiece of four years of work. Being recognized by this extremely competitive award really gives me a big feeling of reward."

Check out the SIGDA website for more information on the award.