Nominations for the 57th Design Automation Conference Innovators Under 40 Award Now Open

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For 57 years, the future of innovation for the design and automation of electronic systems and circuits has been found at the Design Automation Conference (DAC). This year will be no different. DAC is now accepting nominations for the Under-40 Innovators Award at the 57th DAC. The Under-40 Innovators Award is sponsored by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The award will recognize up to five of the top young innovators (nominees should be 40 years or younger in age as of June 1, 2020) who are movers and shakers in the field of design and automation of electronics.

The 57th DAC will be held at Moscone West Center in San Francisco, CA, from July 19-23, 2020. DAC will co-locate with SEMICON West 2020, which is being held at the Moscone Center, North and South Halls, July 21-23, 2020.

From beyond the traditional automation around chip implementation, design automation is rapidly expanding to new areas such as neuromorphic computing, biological systems, cyber-security and cyber-physical systems. Within the electronics industry, the advent of new technologies and alternate scaling approaches using new integration methods are emerging as traditional CMOS technology scaling slows down. Young innovators are redefining and shaping the future of the design automation field in industry, research labs, start-ups and academia, and DAC wants to recognize the best and brightest.

Nomination criteria:

The Under-40 Innovators Award is open to people in industry or academia with technical contributions of notable impact in the field of design and automation of electronics. Nominees are individuals who have made their contributions through work within an organization to the design automation community and to the broader society. The award is intended for specific contributions such as commercial products, software or hardware systems, or specific algorithms or tools incorporated into other systems widely used by industry and academia. Nominations that emphasize only metrics such as number of publications, patents, and citations will not be sufficient. The impact as measured by commercialization and/or wide adoption of the nominee’s contributions is required.

The nomination for this award should include a one-page summary (fewer than 500 words) of the nominee’s technical work with specific emphasis on the impact of the work, a cover page with the email address, daytime telephone number and date of birth of the nominee. All nominations should be supported by at least three letters of recommendation. One of those letters of recommendation needs to be from a leader inside the nominee’s organization. Self-nominations are not allowed.

Up to five awards will be given each year at DAC, sponsored by ACM, and IEEE. The winners will be recognized at the opening session at the 57th DAC. Nominations must be received by March 31, 2020 as a single PDF file and sent to: dacunder40award@dac.com

Previous Under 40 Innovator Award Recipients:

56th DAC:

• Yunji Chen, Full professor, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Huichu Liu, Staff Research Scientist, Intel Corporation
• Rasit Onur Topaloglu, Senior Hardware Developer & Program Manager, IBM Corp.
• Robert Wille, Professor, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
• Vijay Raghunathan, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University

55th DAC

• David Atienza, Associate Professor at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
• Sheng Li, Platform Architect at Google
• Arijit Raychowdhury, Associate Professor at Georgia Tech
• Yu Wang, Associate Professor of Tsinghua University and co-founder of DeePhi Tech
• Zhiru Zhang, Associate Professor at Cornell Univ.

54th DAC:

• John Arthur, Research Staff Member and Hardware Manager, IBM Research – Almaden
• Paul Cunningham, Vice President of R&D, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
• Douglas Densmore, Associate Professor, Boston Univ.
• Yongpan Liu, Associate Professor, Tsinghua Univ.
• Sasikanth Manipatruni, Physicist/Engineer, Intel Corp.

For additional information on the award, and the Design Automation Conference visit www.dac.com