February 12, 2019 -- The CAD Contest at ICCAD is a challenging, multi-month, research and development competition, focusing on advanced, real-world problems in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). It is open to multi-person teams world-wide. Each year the organizing committee announce three challenging problems in different topic areas provided by industrial companies. Contestants can participate in one or more problems. The prizes will be awarded at an ICCAD special session dedicated to this contest.

Since its inaugural year of 2012, the CAD Contest at ICCAD has been attracting more than a hundred teams per year (112 teams from 12 regions in 2015, 135 teams from 11 regions in 2016, and 123 teams from 10 regions in 2017, 136 teams from 11 regions in 2018), fostering productive industry-academia collaborations, and leading to hundreds of publications in top-tier conferences and journals. The contest undoubtedly boosts EDA research and keeps enhancing its impact.

Contest Problems

Problem A: Logic Regression on High Dimensional Boolean Space
                  (Cadence Design Systems, Inc.)
Problem B: System-level FPGA Routing with Timing Division Multiplexing Technique
                  (Synopsys, Inc.)
Problem C: LEF/DEF Based Open-Source Global Router
                  (Mentor Graphics & University of California San Diego)

Tentative Schedule

• Registration deadline May 10, 2019
• Alpha test submission June 21, 2019
• Beta test submission July 26, 2019
• Final submission
• August 30, 2019
• Award ceremony November 4, 2019 (at ICCAD)

Awards for each Problem
1st Place Award:

• NTD 50,000 / team (approx. US$ 1,650)
• Certificate / person
• Open-source bonus for Problem C: US$ 5,500 / team

2nd Place Award:

• NTD 30,000 / team (approx. US$ 1,000)
• Certificate / person
• Open-source bonus for Problem C: US$ 1,500 / team

3rd Place Award:

• NTD 30,000 / team (approx. US$ 1,000)
• Certificate / person
• Open-source bonus for Problem C: US$ 500 / team

Honorable Mentions:

• Certificate / person

Important Notice

» The recipients of monetary awards must be students.
» The amount of monetary awards in US dollars may change due to currency fluctuation.
» According to the Law of Taiwan, 10% of the monetary award will be deducted if the recipient is a Taiwanese taxpayer, whereas it is 20% if the recipient is a non-Taiwanese taxpayer.
» We reserve the right to adjust the numbers of prize winners and honorable mentions.

Organizing Committee
Contest Chair
Ulf Schlichtmann, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Contest Co-chairs
Sabya Das; Synopsys, Inc., USA
Ing-Chao Lin; National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Mark Po-Hung Lin; National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan

Topic Chairs
Jacky (Chih-Jen) Hsu, Rocky (Chi-An) Wu, and Ching-Yi Huang; Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Yu-Hsuan Su, Emplus Huang, Hung-Hao Lai, and Yi-Cheng Zhao; Synopsys, Inc.
Alexander Volkov, Sergei Dolgov; Mentor Graphics
Lutong Wang, Bangqi Xu;
University of California San Diego

Sponsors

IEEE CEDA ( http://ieee-ceda.org/)
ACM SIGDA ( http://sigda.org/)
Ministry of Education, Taiwan ( http://www.edu.tw/)
Synopsys, Inc.( http://www.synopsys.com/)
Cadence Academic Network ( http://www.cadence.com/)
Taiwan IC Design Society ( http://www.ticd.org.tw/)
National Chip Implementation Center, Taiwan ( http://www.cic.narl.org.tw/)