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Four Exceptional Innovators Selected to Receive the Design Automation Conference Under-40 Innovators Award

Engineers from industry to academia recognized for contributions to EDA

SAN FRANCISCO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — November 2, 2021 — The future of innovation for the design and automation of electronic systems and circuits can be found each year at the annual Design Automation Conference (DAC). DAC and its sponsors – the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) – are pleased to announce the four winners of the Under-40 Innovators Award. The award recognizes the top young innovators who have made a significant impact in the field of design and automation of electronics.

The award winners will be recognized at the 58th DAC being held December 5-9, 2021, at Moscone West in San Francisco, CA. The honorees will participate at the award session being held on Tuesday, December 7 at 8:45 A.M. PDT during the live DAC event.

The 2021 Under-40 Innovation honorees are:

Tung-Chieh Chen, Co-founder and CEO, Maxeda Technology

Tung-Chieh Chen is a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Maxeda Technology since 2015. The main product MaxPlace is a dataflow-driven VLSI floorplan exploration system that can efficiently reduce physical design time from weeks to days. MaxPlace has been adopted by four of the top ten IC fabless companies in Taiwan.

Dr. Chen was the architect of the mixed-size placement tool, NTUplace, that won third place in 2006 ACM ISPD Placement Contest. The placer tool became the core engine of SpringSoft Laker Custom Design. He was the R&D Manager of the place-and-route team for both digital/analog design automation at SpringSoft. SpringSoft was acquired by Synopsys in 2012.

Dr. Chen received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University (NTU), in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He was the first-place winner in 2007 ACM SIGDA CADathlon Contest. He received the Best Dissertation Award from the Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering (GIEE) at NTU in 2008, and the Electronic Elite Special Contribution Award from GIEE at NTU in 2017. He has published 12 IEEE Transactions on CAD journal papers, 25 IEEE/ACM conference papers, and 14 U.S. patents, all on VLSI floor planning and placement. Dr. Chen has served as a technical committee member for ISPD, ICCAD, ASP-DAC, and DAC.

Jason Oberg, Co-founder and CTO, Tortuga Logic

Dr. Jason Oberg is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Tortuga Logic, where he is responsible for overseeing the company’s technology and strategic positioning. Dr. Oberg works closely with Tortuga Logic’s executive management team, engineering teams, and customers to drive the company’s next-generation hardware security products.

Dr. Oberg brings years of deep hardware security expertise, has facilitated the development of several hardware security products, and is a member of the Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC) and Common Weaknesses Enumeration (CWE) board. His work has been cited over 1000 times and he holds seven issued and pending patents. Prior to his CTO role, Dr. Oberg led Tortuga Logic as co-founder and CEO from 2014 – 20 where he facilitated raising capital, recruiting the initial team, and drove the company’s product revenue growth YoY. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Barbara and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego.

Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, Founder, CEO at Instrumental

Shedletsky is the CEO and founder of Instrumental Inc., a manufacturing data company creating the first end-to-end optimization platform for product teams building electronic devices. Instrumental combines AI-powered defect and anomaly detection, failure analysis tools, complete issue monitoring and reporting, and production-quality in-line tests into a single end-to-end optimization platform. Instrumental is trusted by leading Fortune 500 brands like Bose, Cisco Meraki, and Honeywell, with customers spanning consumer electronics, industrial electronics, automotive, and medical devices.

Shedletsky holds two degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. Before founding Instrumental, she led system product design for a handful of iPods and the first-generation Apple Watch. She founded and leads the Women in STEM Mentorship Program, which connects women university students with practicing industry mentors and is a Forbes Senior Contributor in the field of manufacturing.

Ying Wang, Associate Professor, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Dr. Wang’s research expertise is focused on VLSI testing, reliability, and the design automation of domain-specific processors such as accelerators for computer vision, deep learning, graph computing and robotics. His group has conducted pioneering work in the open-source frameworks for automated neural network accelerator generation and customization. He has published more than 20 papers at DAC, and over 120 papers on other IEEE/ACM conferences and journals, including ICCAD, ISCA, and DATE. He holds over 30 patents related to chip design.

Dr. Wang is also a co-founder of Jeejio Tech in Beijing, which is granted the Special Start-up Award of the year 2018 by Chinese Academy of Sciences. Jeejio offers full-stack infrastructure solutions, from chips to cloud infrastructure, to clients for them to quickly develop AIoT products. Among Wang’s honors, includes the Young Talent Development Program Awardee from Chinese Association of Science and Technology, 2017 CCF Intel outstanding researcher award, and the 2019 Early Career Award from Chinese Computer Federation. He has also received several awards from international conferences, including the winner of System Design Contest at DAC 2018, IEEE rebooting LPIRC 2016, the Best Paper Award at ITC-Asia 2018, GLVLSI 2021 (2nd) and ICCD 2019, as well as the best paper nominee in ASPDAC.

DAC offers outstanding training, education, exhibits and networking opportunities for hardware and software designers, researchers, software developers, IT engineers and software tool vendors. This year's DAC will be a hybrid event. There will be a face-to-face conference and a virtual program. The live event will take place at Moscone West in San Francisco, CA from December 5-9, 2021, with the virtual event taking place December 13 - January 1, 2022. DAC will co-locate with SEMICON West 2021, which is being held December 7-9, at Moscone South Hall and the RISC-V Summit which will be held December 6-8, at Moscone West. DAC attendees have access to DAC exhibits plus the RISC-V Summit an SEMICON West expo halls.

Registration for DAC is now open. There are three ways to attend the live DAC event, December 5-9, 2021: complimentary I LOVE DAC pass, Designer/IP/Embedded Track Special or Full Conference pass. For those who can attend the live event, the virtual DAC conference will begin December 13 and be available through January 1, 2022. Registration for virtual DAC is now open.

The I Love DAC pass is available for the three days of the live event sponsored by Cliosoft, Empyrean Technology and Menta. The I LOVE DAC pass will include:

For more information on the DAC program and registration please visit: www.dac.com

About DAC

The Design Automation Conference (DAC) is recognized as the premier event for the design of electronic circuits and systems, and for electronic design automation (EDA) and silicon solutions. A diverse worldwide community representing more than 1,000 organizations attends each year, represented by system designers and architects, logic and circuit designers, validation engineers, CAD managers, senior managers and executives to researchers and academicians from leading universities. Close to 60 technical sessions selected by a committee of electronic design experts offer information on recent developments and trends, management practices and new products, methodologies and technologies. A highlight of DAC is its exhibition and suite area with approximately 160 of the leading and emerging EDA, silicon, intellectual property (IP) and design services providers. The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and is supported by ACM's Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM SIGDA).

Design Automation Conference acknowledges trademarks or registered trademarks of other organizations for their respective products and services.


Contact:

Michelle Clancy, 58th DAC Publicity Chair
Press@dac.com
1-503-702-4732