David Z. Pan

University of Texas at Austin

Title: AI for Chip Design & EDA: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (?)

Abstract

AI for chip design and EDA has received tremendous interests from both academia and industry in recent years. It touches everything that chip designers care about, from power/performance/area (PPA) to cost/yield, turn-around-time, security, among others. It is everywhere, in all levels of design abstractions, testing, verification, DFM, mask synthesis, for digital as well as some aspects of analog/mixed-signal/RF designs as well. It has also been used to tweak the overall design flow and hyper-parameter tuning, but not yet all at once, e.g., generative AI from design specification all the way to layouts, in a correct-by-construction manner. In this talk, I will cover some recent advancement/breakthroughs in AI for chip design/EDA and share my perspectives.

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Bio

David Pan (Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and SPIE) is a Professor and holder of Silicon Laboratories Endowed Chair at the Chandra Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include electronic design automation, synergistic AI and IC co-optimizations, design for manufacturing, hardware security, and design/CAD for analog/mixed-signal and emerging technologies. He has published over 480 refereed journal/conference papers and 9 US patents. He has served in many editorial boards and conference committees, including various leadership roles such as DAC 2024 Technical Program Chair, DAC 2023 Technical Program Co-Chair, ICCAD 2019 General Chair, and ISPD 2008 General Chair. He has received many awards, including 20 Best Paper Awards (from TCAD, DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASP-DAC, ISPD, HOST, SRC, IBM, etc.), SRC Technical Excellence Award, DAC Top 10 Author Award in Fifth Decade, ASP-DAC Frequently Cited Author Award, NSF CAREER Award, IBM Faculty Award (4 times), and many international CAD contest awards. He has held various advisory, consulting, or visiting positions in academia and industry, such as MIT and Google. He has graduated 52 PhD students and postdocs who have won many awards, including ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals 1st Place (twice, 2018 and 2021), and Outstanding PhD Dissertation Awards 5 times from ACM/SIGDA and EDAA.