• Congratulations to Zhiang Wang on filing his Ph.D. thesis!!!

• Prof. Kahng presented an overview of his invited paper "Solvers, Engines, Tools and Flows: The Next Wave for AI/ML in Physical Design" today at ISPD-2024. (Links: paper, PowerPoint with speaker notes, video.) He also participated in today's "EDA Challenges at Advanced Technology Nodes" panel session (position statement .pptx with speaker notes).

• Congratulations to Mingyu Woo on filing his Ph.D. thesis!!!

• Congratulations to Zhiang Wang on passing his Ph.D. defense!!!
• Congratulations to Mingyu Woo on passing his Ph.D. defense!!!

• Prof. Kahng gave the evening keynote at ASP-DAC 2024 today, on "AI/ML and EDA: Current Status and Perspectives on the Future". His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes). Many thanks to Professors Kyu-Myung Choi and Taewhan Kim for the kind invitation to give the talk!

• Prof. Kahng gave the opening keynote today for a 6-day workshop on "OpenROAD for Low-Cost ASIC Design and Rapid Innovation" at IIT Guwahati. The title of Prof. Kahng's talk was "OpenROAD: A Foundation for IC Design Innovation and Workforce Development". His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes), and a video of his keynote is HERE (.mp4). Many thanks to Professor Gaurav Trivedi of IITG and others for organizing this wonderful event!

• Congratulations to Zhiang Wang on passing his University Qualifying Examination!!!

• Prof. Kahng presented a talk, "OpenROAD: A Platform for Innovation and Workforce Development", at the U.S.-Japan Collaborative Workshop: Accelerating IC Design [Phase 1]. His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• Prof. Kahng presented a keynote talk, "The OpenROAD Project: Status and Directions", at today's 8th ADG OpenPower Workshop, "Chip Design to AI Solutions". His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• Prof. Kahng served on the "Perspectives from the Engineering Community" panel at today's IEEE-USA's Designing Chips with CHIPS: West Coast Pre-Silicon Summit. Slides for his opening position statement are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes). Note that the last slide has a QR code that links to additional background thoughts HERE.

• Prof. Kahng had the privilege of moderating the ICCAD-2023 panel on "LLM-Aided Design" today, with panelists Anna Goldie, Ruchir Puri, Ramesh Karri, Bei Yu and Haoxing (Mark) Ren. PDF of the compiled position statement slides is HERE. PPTX source for Prof. Kahng's introduction, plus the slide with Prof. Bei Yu's demo video embedded, is HERE.

• Prof. Kahng gave the opening keynote talk, "OpenROAD: The Journey So Far, and the Roadmap", at the 2023 ORconf in Munich. His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk at the DARPA MTO ERI 2.0 Summit's workshop on "A New Approach to Microelectronics Workforce Development for Government" (Heilmeier question #3). His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• Prof. Kahng gave one of the DAC-2023's new "Lightning Talks" today at the "Everything, EveryPLACE, All At Once!" session. His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes) and his 2-page writeup is HERE.

• Prof. Kahng participated in the "Why is Curvy Design an Opportunity Now?" research panel at the 60th Design Automation Conference. His brief position statement is HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• Prof. Kahng gave an invited talk, "EDA Perspectives and the Future", at today's meeting of the MITRE Engenuity Semiconductor Alliance. His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes). Many thanks to Dr. Nitin Shah for the kind invitation!

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk today on "Academic EDA Research: Perspectives and Paths Forward" at the University of Rochester ECE Department. His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• We are really happy to see this blog post, "Solution for Open-Source Chip Design on AWS", from the AWS team! It gives a great overview of why open-source chip design and design enablement are so important today. Thanks and kudos to the authors!

• We are happy to announce that the first C++ PROBE SMT AutoCell generator is now open-sourced and public on GitHub: https://github.com/ABKGroup/PROBE_SMT_AutoCell. Kudos to Dooseok Yoon and Yucheng Wang for all their hard work to achieve this milestone!

• Congratulations to Minsoo Kim on filing his Ph.D. thesis!!!

• Congratulations to Minsoo Kim on passing his Ph.D. defense!!!

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk about The OpenROAD Project at today's OSDA-2023 3rd Workshop on Open-Source Design Automation in Antwerp. His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• Prof. Kahng posted this fourth and final update to the June 6 "For the Record" Google Doc. Looking forward to the presentation in Session 8 of ISPD-2023 this coming Tuesday! Thanks as always to all who have engaged in this effort! [cached .pdf of Google Doc file]

• Our short video describing the ISPD-2023 MacroPlacement paper has been completed and posted! Here are links to short video and slides ( .mp4, .pptx ), long video and slides ( .mp4, .pptx ) and our invited paper.

• Congratulations and kudos to Mr. Shreyas Thumathy, a senior at Canyon Crest Academy in San Diego, on his forthcoming ISQED-2023 paper that proposes a new Multi-Source Prim-Dijkstra construction, and for launching a new ML for CAD contest, in collaboration with Mingyu Woo. The contest has over $7000 in available prizes -- please spread the word!

• Professor Carver Mead, 2022 Kyoto Prize Laureate for Advanced Technology, has written a new book: Engineering View of Gravitation. The PDF has not yet been posted on arXiv, so Professor Mead has asked that it be posted HERE.

  This is excellent background for Professor Mead's Kyoto Prize Symposium Lecture, "Engineering Concepts Clarify Physical Law", on March 15, and the "Fireside Chat" to follow on the same topic with UCSD Engineering Dean Al Pisano and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Larry Smarr on March 17. Enjoy!

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk, "Bars and Barriers to Overcome for Shared ML EDA Infrastructure" at today's NSF Workshop on Shared Infrastructure for Machine Learning EDA. His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• Congratulations to Mingyu Woo on passing his University Qualifying Examination!!!

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk, "Connecting Practical Optimization to Learning-enabled IC Design: Building Blocks and Targets" at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Suwon, South Korea. His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes). Check out the great Hier-RTLMP macro placement results !!!

• Prof. Kahng and students Sayak Kundu and Chien-Yi Yang took part in the joint workshop of TILOS and the AI-EDA Consortium for AI-Based Semiconductor Design, Feb. 19-20 in Busan! Thanks to NSF for the International Collaboration supplement award that made this possible. Pictures: here and here (more at AIEDA-NEWS).

• We are very happy to announce that TritonPart and Hier-RTLMP are now merged into OpenROAD !!! TritonPart is an open-source hypergraph partitioner that replaces MLPart and hMETIS. Hier-RTLMP scales to complex IP blocks with hundreds of macros with hard-to-beat QOR evaluated after post-route optimization. Kudos to Bodhi Pramanik and Zhiang Wang for their hard work on TritonPart, and to Zhiang Wang and Ravi Varadarajan for their hard work on Hier-RTLMP !!!

• We are very happy to announce that PROBE3.0, our latest DTCO and PPAC pathfinding framework, is now open-sourced in GitHub, HERE. Kudos to Minsoo Kim and Dooseok Yoon for achieving this milestone !!!

• Our ISPD-2023 invited paper, "Assessment of Reinforcement Learning for Macro Placement", has been finalized and is now available! (.pdf) [Update on February 21: It is now ABKGroup's first-ever arXiv posting: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11014 .] Kudos to Sayak Kundu, Zhiang Wang and Yucheng Wang for all their efforts. Stay tuned for our video and talk at ISPD-2023 on Tuesday, March 28 !

• The long-awaited IEEE Design & Test special issue on Machine Learning for CAD/EDA has been published! Please see this link for the complete issue.

• The new book, Machine Learning Applications in Electronic Design Automation, edited by Haoxing Ren and Jiang Hu, has been published by Springer. Prof. Kahng and Zhiang Wang contributed the first chapter, "ML for Design QoR Prediction".

• Congratulations to Mr. Shreyas Thumathy, a senior at Canyon Crest Academy, on his paper acceptance at ISQED-2023: "An Effective Cost-Skew Tradeoff Heuristic for VLSI Global Routing". Coming soon: data for a new machine learning challenge!

• Prof. Kahng posted this third update to the June 6 "For the Record" Google Doc. There has been further progress on many fronts, including strong human and non-RL baselines, open-source implementation of simulated annealing and force-directed placement, and bringup of new testcases and tool flows. Continued kudos and thanks to all who have engaged in this effort! [cached .pdf of Google Doc file]

• Prof. Kahng posted this second update to the June 6 "For the Record" Google Doc. There has been substantial progress along directions of methodology, baselines, and ablation studies in our efforts to provide an open, transparent baseline implementation of Google Brain's Circuit Training method. Kudos and thanks to all who have engaged in this effort! [cached .pdf of Google Doc file]

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk, "Some Thoughts on the DTCO Enablement Gap", today for an audience at Samsung Semiconductor R&D. His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• Prof. Kahng gave the opening talk, "Challenges and Opportunities for AI in Electronic Design Automation", at the 2022 BrainLink X-Lab Day meeting (Global Technology Networking for System Semiconductor Innovation) in Busan, South Korea. The slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• Congratulations to Bodhi Pramanik and Zhiang Wang, along with coauthors Ismail Bustany and Yiannis Koutis, on receiving the ACM/IEEE William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award (back end) today ! Here are links to the paper, talk slides (.pptx source with speaker notes), and short video.

• Prof. Kahng gave an invited talk at ICCAD-2022 on "A Mixed Open-Source and Proprietary EDA Commons for Education and Prototyping". The slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes), and here are links to the paper (.pdf) and the posted video for remote attendees (.mp4).

• Prof. Kahng is grateful and humbled to be the faculty host for this year's Kyoto Prize laureate in Advanced Technology: Professor Carver Mead of Caltech. Today was the kick-off of the 2022 Kyoto Prize Symposium events in North America. An attempt to convey Professor Mead's influence to a general audience, within a six-minute budget: PowerPoint presentation with embedded speaker notes and video.

• Prof. Kahng was part of a panel today on "Top 5 Opportunities for ML Disruption" at the 4th MLCAD Workshop. His slides are HERE (.pptx source). Watch this space for the other panelists' slides when they are available!

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk on "Our Real Scaling Challenge: People" at the ACCESS-CEDA seminar. His slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• Prof. Kahng posted this update to the June 6 "For the Record" Google Doc. The update points out substantial progress in our efforts to provide an open, transparent baseline implementation of Google Brain's Circuit Training method. Kudos to Sayak Kundu, Ravi Varadarajan, Zhiang Wang, and Prof. Cheng's student Yucheng Wang. [cached .pdf of Google Doc file]

• Brian Bailey wrote a nice article, "The Next Incarnation of EDA", in today's issue of Semiconductor Engineering. [cached .pdf of the article]

• Prof. Kahng was in today's "Machine Learning for Electronic Design Automation: Irrational Exuberance or the Dawn of a Golden Age" panel at the 59th Design Automation Conference. His position statement slides are HERE (.pptx source with speaker notes).

• We held the "Open-Source EDA and Benchmarking Summit" Birds-of-a-Feather meeting today at the 59th Design Automation Conference. The background, presentation slides, meeting notes and participants are collected HERE.

• Professor Sicun (Sean) Gao presented "Shared Foundations for ML and EDA in the TILOS AI Institute" to lead off today's Research Special Session on "Re-visioning what EDA can do for ML, and what ML can do for EDA" at the 59th Design Automation Conference. Thanks to all the special session speakers for great talks and an exciting panel discussion, and thanks to Professors Jiang Hu and Ulf Schlichtmann for moderating. The four talks are available at the following links: (1) Prof. Sicun Gao slides, (2) Dr. Satrajit Chatterjee slides, (3) Dr. Siddhartha Nath slides, and (4) Dr. Igor Markov slides.

• The DAC-2022 panel on "What is the Future for Open-Source EDA?" had a great discussion this morning. The moderator was Andreas Olofsson, with panelists Chuck Alpert, Mamta Bansal, Peter Gadfort, Bill Leszinske and Noel Menezes. (Prof. Kahng served as the organizer.) The opening and position statement slides are HERE.

• Prof. Kahng presented "The OpenROAD Project: An open-source platform for IC design innovation" at today's Circuits Workshop 2 (The Emerging Ecosystem of Open-Source Chip Design) of the 2022 VLSI Symposium. (.pptx source with speaker notes) (.mp4)

• Prof. Kahng and the committee for the P. O. Pistilli Scholarship extend their congratulations to Ms. Janiya Richardson of Tallahassee, Florida on receiving the 2022 Pistilli Scholarship!

• The second edition of the KLMH Physical Design book has been finalized and will be in print soon! Here is the cover. Huge thanks to Professor Jens Lienig whose dedicated efforts made this happen. The book's website will be updated with the publication of the new edition.

• Prof. Kahng shared some background as "Reviewer #3" of Google's paper on graph placement, in this Google Doc. The Doc points out a new MacroPlacement repo in GitHub, and the DAC-2022 "Open-Source EDA and Benchmarking Summit" Birds-of-a-Feather session that we are organizing -- July 12, 2022 from 7-10pm in Room 3000 of Moscone West in San Francisco!

• Prof. Kahng presented "AI/ML, Optimization and EDA in TILOS, an NSF National AI Research Institute" in the opening keynote at GLSVLSI-2022 in Irvine. It was great to see people live and in person! (.pptx with speaker notes)

• Prof. Kahng and the team presented The OpenROAD Project in the first talk at DARPA MADAM (Microelectronics Access Design Automation Meeting), held June 1-3 at UCSD ! The talk slides (.pptx with speaker notes) are HERE. We also presented a poster (.pptx), HERE.

• Prof. Kahng presented "Introducing TILOS, an NSF National AI Research Institute for Advances in Optimization" today at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. (.pptx with speaker notes).

• Prof. Kahng presented _these slides (.pptx)_ in a panel on "Proprietary vs. Open Source: Friends or Foes?" at the NSF Integrated Circuit Research, Education and Workforce Development Workshop in Santa Clara.

• Prof. Kahng presented "AI/ML, Optimization and EDA in TILOS, an NSF National AI Research Institute" today at Cadence Design Systems, with some contents added since the January 18th talk! (.pptx with speaker notes)

• Prof. Kahng presented "The OpenROAD Project: A Foundation for Research and Education in EDA and IC Design" at today's CICC-2022 Educational Session 3 on System Design with Open Source Tools. (.pptx with speaker notes and extra screenshots at the end!) (.mp4)

• Prof. Kahng presented "A University Research Perspective and Update on AI-Enhanced Co-Design of Microelectronics" at the Sandia National Laboratories 2022 Workshop on AI-Enhanced Co-Design for Next-Generation Microelectronics. (.pptx with speaker notes)

• Prof. Kahng presented an ISPD-2022 keynote talk, "Leveling Up: A Trajectory of OpenROAD, TILOS and Beyond". (paper .pdf) ( .pptx with speaker notes) (keynote session .mp4 including Q&A) (cached .mp4)

• Prof. Kahng gave a keynote talk, "AI/ML, Optimization and EDA in TILOS, an NSF National AI Research Institute," today at the VLSID-2022 conference. The talk is on YouTube _here_.

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk, "The OpenROAD Project: Today and Beyond", today at the UCLA ECE Department colloquium. [PPT source with speaker notes]

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk, "AI/ML, Optimization and EDA in TILOS, an NSF National AI Research Institute," today at a Synopsys APUP Special Session. Exciting to see 500+ folks on the Zoom! _(ppt with speaker notes)_ , _(pdf)_ , _(video, courtesy Synopsys)_

• Prof. Kahng, Jinwook Jung (IBM Research), Seungwon Kim and Ravi Varadarajan gave Tutorial #1, "IEEE CEDA DATC RDF and METRICS2.1: Toward a Standard Platform for ML-Enabled EDA and IC Design", today at ASP-DAC 2022. Tutorial materials: part 1 _.pptx_ _.mp4_, part 2 _.pptx_ _.mp4_, part 3 _.pptx_ _.mp4_, part 4 _.pptx_ _.mp4_, part 5 _.pptx_ _.mp4_, part 6 _.pptx_ _.mp4_, part 7 _.pptx_ _.mp4_, parts 1-7 integrated _.pptx_ _.mp4_. Additional tutorial materials are here.

• Some news on Rendezvous With Rama, which Prof. Kahng worked on nearly two decades ago! Revelations Entertainment's passion and dedication to this project has been an inspiration to so many for all these years.

• Congratulations to Minsoo Kim on passing his University Qualifying Examination!!!

• Prof. Kahng presented _these slides (ppt with speaker notes, backup)_ at the "Exchanging EDA Data for AI/ML Using Standard API" _panel session_ in the Design, IP and Embedded Systems Track at DAC-2021.

• Prof. Kahng presented with Dr. Ismail Bustany and Dr. Padmini Gopalakrishnan _these slides (pdf)_ in the DAC-2021 tutorial: "Adding machine learning to the mix of EDA optimization algorithms". Supplementary files are: Prof. Laleh Behjat's _introduction_, Dr. Gopalakrishnan's _timing closure section_, and Dr. Siddhartha Nath's _guest remarks_ (use presentation mode to hear audio).

• Congratulations to Zhiang Wang on passing his ECE Prelim Exam today!!!

• Prof. Kahng spoke today in the "Industry" segment of the NSF Integrated Circuits Research, Education, and Workforce Development Workshop. [PPT source with speaker notes]

• Prof. Kahng will serve as PI and director of The Institute for Learning-enabled Optimization at Scale (TILOS), an NSF-funded National AI Research Institute for Advances in Optimization that is partially supported by Intel. The TILOS website is: https://tilos.ai (here) (UCSD Announcement) (NSF Announcement)

• Prof. Kahng has a "News and Views" item in today's issue of Nature, commenting on the Google Brain macro placement paper (.pdf). Online link: here.

• Congratulations to Bangqi Xu for receiving this year's 2020-2021 ECE Dr. William S.C. Chang Best Dissertation Award !

• Prof. Kahng gave an invited talk on "Advancing Placement" today at the 2021 International Symposium on Physical Design. [paper pdf] [ppt source with speaker notes] [video of talk - long version] (All short and long versions of talks are at the ISPD-2021 YouTube channel.)

• Congratulations to Bangqi Xu on filing his Ph.D. thesis!!!

• Prof. Kahng gave a plenary talk at ICEIC-2021: "Learning, Optimization and the Scaling of Design Automation Technology". [ppt source with speaker notes] [video]

• Prof. Kahng presented these slides in response to the "Key Problems Related to EDA Technologies in the Next 10-20 Years" prompt in today's "EDA Tools and Methodologies" roundtable (at the "NSF EDA Workshop"). [PPT source with speaker notes]

• Congratulations to Mingyu Woo on passing his ECE Prelim Exam today!!!

• Prof. Kahng gave the opening talk of this week's PDN Seminar at Qualcomm. [ppt source with speaker notes]

• Congratulations to Bangqi Xu on passing his Ph.D. defense!!!

• Prof. Kahng gave the opening keynote of MLCAD-2020, "MLCAD Today and Tomorrow: Learning, Optimization and Scaling". [ppt source with speaker notes] [video] [cached video]

• The ACM/IEEE International Workshop on System-Level Interconnect: Problems and Pathfinding was held today, with wonderful keynotes from Dr. Mustafa Badaroglu (Qualcomm) and Dr. Patrick Groeneveld (Cerebras). Thanks to many volunteers (steering committee, organizing committee and technical program committee) for all the hard work to make SLIP^2 2020 happen!

• ABKGroup members attended the 8th Bi-Annual Workshop of the Center for Design-Enabled Nanofabrication (C-DEN). Minsoo Kim gave the talk, "PROBE2.0: A Systematic Framework for Routability Assessment from Technology to Design in Sub-7nm Nodes". Many thanks to our sponsors (Intel, Samsung, Mentor, KLA, ASML, Zeiss - and Qualcomm and Cadence), faculty, and students for the strong collaborations and research outcomes over the past four years.

• Prof. Kahng gave this talk on "Machine Learning in EDA (and IC Design)" at today's meeting of the Si2 AI/ML in EDA Special Interest Group. [ppt source with speaker notes]

• Prof. Kahng gave the keynote talk, "Open-Source EDA: If We Build It, Who Will Come?", today at VLSI-SoC 2020 (the 28th IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration). [ppt source with speaker notes] [invited paper] [video] [cached video]

• Professor Kahng gave a keynote talk today at the IC Design Investment Forum held in Hsinchu, Taiwan. [ppt source with speaker notes]

• Prof. Kahng and Mohamed Kassem of Efabless.com gave a talk, "OpenROAD open RTL-to-GDS update", at the CHIPS Alliance Workshop [ppt source with speaker notes]. And, here is the "Breakfast Bytes" blog post from Paul McLellan ... [link] [cached local copy].

• Prof. Kahng gave this talk, "The OpenROAD Project: Updates and Futures", at Western Digital today. [PPT slides with speaker notes]

• Professor Kahng received a 2020 Qualcomm Faculty Award --- we are really grateful to Qualcomm for recognizing and supporting our research!

• Professor Kahng gave a talk, "A 'Life Cycle' of Teaching and Research on EDA and IC Implementation Methodology", at CadenceLive! North America. Here are the [slides] and a [video] that the organizers recorded. And, here is the "Breakfast Bytes" blog post from Paul McLellan ... [link] [cached local copy].

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk on PPA Optimization at an internal conference. Here are _sanitized slides_ and a _video_.

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk "On Scaling and Futures for IC Design, Machine Learning, and EDA" at Google. Here are _the slides_ and a _video_, courtesy of his host, Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini (Google Brain).

• Prof. Kahng gave the keynote for the IBM EDA Workshop on machine learning today. Here are _the slides_ and a _video_, courtesy of his hosts.

• Congratulations to Lutong Wang on filing his Ph.D. thesis!!!

• At ASP-DAC 2020, Prof. Kahng received an ASP-DAC Prolific Author award (> 25 papers in the 25-year history of ASP-DAC), and with his coauthors received a _"Most Influential Paper" award_ as well.

• Congratulations to Vaishnav Srinivas on filing his Ph.D. thesis!!!

• Congratulations to Vaishnav Srinivas on passing his Ph.D. defense!!!

• Paul McLellan's blog post regarding the OpenROAD project and the recent VSDOpen 2019 conference keynote talk, __"OpenROAD: Open-Source EDA from RTL to GDSII"__ , November 15, 2019. __[cached local copy]__

• Congratulations to Bangqi Xu on passing his University Qualifying Examination!!!

• Congratulations to Lutong Wang on passing his Ph.D. defense!!!

• Prof. Kahng presented _these_ slides in the talk of "Looking Into the Mirror of Open Source" at _ICCAD-2019_.

• Bangqi Xu presented _these_ slides on the results of the ICCAD-2019 LEF/DEF Based Global Routing Contest, today at _ICCAD-2019_. Congratulations to the winning teams, and thanks to Mentor Graphics and Cadence Academic Network for their support of the contest!

• Prof. Kahng presented _these_ slides in the announcement of RDF-2019 at _ICCAD-2019_.

• Professor Kahng presented _these_ slides in his opening keynote of VSDOpen Conference 2019, https://www.vlsisystemdesign.com/2019-2/

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk, "The OpenROAD Project", at today's "Your Research Enabled by Arm - SoC Labs" workshop at the Arm Research Summit. The slides are _here_.

• Prof. Kahng presented the OpenROAD project's RTL-to-GDS capability in a 65nm foundry node at the DARPA ERI Summit. Here are the links to PowerPoint _slides_ and the accompanying _video_.

• We are happy to announce that the TritonRoute detailed router is now open-sourced and public on GitHub: https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/TritonRoute/ Kudos to Lutong Wang and Bangqi Xu for all their incredibly hard work in developing this first-ever academic detailed router with capability of DRC-clean output in foundry (65nm) enablement.

• Prof. Kahng gave a talk, "Bringing Design Technology and Architecture Closer Together: What Open Source Might Enable", at today's SIGARCH Visioning Workshop at ISCA (link). The slides are _here_.

• Congratulations to Christopher Moyes, who received the UCSD CSE Department's Undergraduate Research Award for 2019. Chris coauthored _this paper_ and _this paper_ with ABKGroup members after a summer internship in the lab. [link] [cached link]

• Five members of the VLSI CAD Laboratory attended the sixth bi-annual workshop of the _Center for Design-Enabled Nanofabrication_. The keynote from Dr. Grace Chen of KLA was on "Technologies enabling metrology and inspection today and challenges in the future". Those wishing to become sponsors of C-DEN can contact Prof. Kahng or Jeff Woods, jewoods@eng.ucsd.edu

• Prof. Kahng's opening position statement at the DAC-2019 technical panel (Session 75), "EDA open sourcing: Dawn of a golden age or pipe dream?" ( http://www2.dac.com/events/eventdetails.aspx?id=267-75 ) presented _these slides_.

• Prof. Kahng and lab members helped to organize the DAC-2019 Birds-of-a-Feather meeting on "Open-Source Academic EDA Software - Continued", which was held today. Inputs were received via _this_ Google Form survey. Outcomes of the meeting, including the opening talk slides from Tom Spyrou, are available at the wiki page: _link_. Hope to see folks at WOSET-2019 (at ICCAD-2019) and at DAC-2020 !

• Prof. Kahng gave the keynote talk, "Challenges for the Next Decade of SLIP" at the 21st ACM/IEEE Workshop on System-Level Interconnect Prediction, co-located with DAC-2019 in Las Vegas. The PowerPoint slides are _here_.

• A _picture_ from today's prize ceremony at the Ho-Am Art Hall in Seoul.

• Congratulations to Sherief Reda on his promotion to full professor at Brown University!

• Prof. Kahng gave his second Ho-Am Lecture at Samsung's DSR facility in Hwaseong. The slides are _here_.

• Congratulations to Lutong Wang for receiving the Qualcomm FMA Fellowship, awarded February 2019 (but we just saw the webpage announcing this today!).

• Congratulations to Dr. Rasit Topaloglu on receiving the DAC Under-40 Innovators Award! The conference announcement is _here_ [cached].

• Prof. Kahng gave a keynote talk, "On the Road to Self-Driving IC Design Tools and Flows", at the joint ADTC & edaWorkshop19. (link) A longer version of the talk is presented on May 17 at TU Munich. (link)

• Congratulations to Uday Mallappa on passing his ECE Prelim Exam today!!!

• The Ho-Am Foundation announced that Prof. Kahng will receive the 2019 Ho-Am Prize in Engineering, in recognition for the ennoblement of the human spirit in academics, the arts, and human welfare (link) [cached].

• Prof. Kahng gave the TAU-2019 keynote talk, "From Recovering Time to Timing Recovery: Some Challenges for the TAU Community", today in Monterey. The slides are available _here_.

• Prof. Kahng presented _these slides_ on the subject of the OpenROAD project and EDA open source, at the Emerging Technologies for EDA workshop in Hsinchu.

• Prof. Kahng presented _these slides_ in the "AI Computing for Smart Life: What, Why, Who, and Where" panel at AICAS-2019 in Hsinchu.

• Congratulations to Minsoo Kim on passing his ECE Prelim Exam today!!!

• Prof. Kahng organized and co-presented with David White (Cadence) and Shankar Sadasivam (Qualcomm) the ASP-DAC 2019 tutorial on recent status and directions for enablement of "no human in loop" IC design. (slides)

• Congratulations to Kwangsoo Han on filing his Ph.D. thesis!!!

• Congratulations to Hyein Lee on filing her Ph.D. thesis!!!

• We are happy to announce that the TritonCTS repository on github is now public as part of the DARPA OpenROAD project. Kudos to Kwangsoo Han, Dr. Jiajia Li and Mateus Fogaça for all their hard work on this!

• All members of the VLSI CAD Laboratory attended the fifth bi-annual workshop of the Center for Design-Enabled Nanofabrication. Minsoo Kim gave a talk on "Mixed-Diffusion Break and Power Stapling Optimizations for Improved PPA in 5nm Technology", and Prof. Kahng gave an overview talk on the Design Enablement thrust of the center. The keynote from Sorin Dobre of Qualcomm was on "Design Challenges Beyond 7nm: What Design Needs from Foundry and DTCO to Enable the Next Generation of Smart Mobile Devices". Those wishing to become sponsors of C-DEN can contact Prof. Kahng or Jeff Woods, jewoods@eng.ucsd.edu

• We are happy to announce that the RePlAce global placement tool repository on GitHub is now updated with the first timing-driven version (v1.1) of RePlAce. Kudos to Mingyu Woo for all his hard work on this.

• Congratulations to Lutong Wang on passing his University Qualifying Examination!!!

• Congratulations to Kwangsoo Han on passing his Ph.D. defense!!!

• Congratulations to Hyein Lee on passing her Ph.D. defense!!!

• All members of the VLSI CAD Laboratory attended the first Workshop on Open-Source EDA Technology at ICCAD-2018. We presented this talk on digital open-source EDA status and this poster on open-source RTL-to-GDSII tool status. Group members also helped put together this extended abstract on "METRICS 2.0" in the workshop notes.

• We are happy to announce that the TritonSizer repository on github is now public as part of the DARPA OpenROAD project. Kudos to Hyein Lee, Dr. Jiajia Li and Minsoo Kim for all their hard work on this!

• We are happy to announce that the OpenSTA repository on github is now public as part of the DARPA OpenROAD project. The software is open source, licensed under GPLv3. Kudos to James Cherry for all his effort to make this happen, and for his willingness to provide this timer to the world!

• Prof. Kahng presented [this slide deck], "Driving, Driven, Along for the Ride: Evolutions of EDA, Manufacturing and Design", in his keynote at the EDPS-2018 Workshop in Milpitas, CA.

• The OpenROAD project website is now available ! Please visit https://theopenroadproject.org.

• We are happy to announce that the RePlAce global placement tool repository on github is now public. Kudos to Lutong Wang, Dr. Ilgweon Kang and Mingyu Woo for all their hard work on this.

• The UCSD-led OpenROAD project in the DARPA IDEA program, which is part of DARPA's Electronics Resurgence Initiative, was announced today. [cached] [Also: University of Michigan announcement.] [cached] [Also: MIT Technology Review.] [cached] [Also: IEEE Spectrum.] [cached] [Also: The San Diego Union-Tribune.] [cached] [Also: LA Times.] [cached]

• Prof. Kahng presented [this slide deck], "Opportunities for Machine Learning in IC Physical Design", at the 2nd IEEE/ACM International Seasonal School on Physical Design.

• UCSD was mentioned in the DAC-2018 SKY talk "DARPA is building a silicon compiler", by Andreas Olofsson, program manager at DARPA. Andreas's presentation slides are [here]. An EE Times article about the SKY talk is [here] [local cached copy].

• Prof. Kahng helped present Tutorial #4, "Designing in Advanced Technologies: A Quick Review of Approaches", at DAC-2018. The slides are [here].

• The [DAC Workshop on Machine Learning in Design Automation (MALENDA)] [cached local copy] will take place from 8:45am to 4:45pm this Sunday, June 24. Prof. Kahng and Dr. Rasit Topaloglu of IBM co-organized the workshop. Prof. Kahng's talk slides and any panel slides will hopefully be posted [here] and [here].

• Prof. Kahng organized a DAC-2018 Birds-of-a-Feather meeting on "Open-Source Academic EDA Software" this coming Wednesday, June 27, from 7:00pm - 8:30pm Pacific Time in Room 3005. This meeting is for anyone interested in a robust ecosystem of free, open-source academic EDA tools. Topics for discussion include the goals for such an ecosystem, along with current landscape, key gaps, pending contributions, and potential strategy/roadmap for the worldwide academic/CAD community. Potential contributors, developers, advisors, users... Everyone is WELCOME ! Please fill out the Google Form at [LINK1] , especially if you'd like to present something to attendees! Outcomes of this meeting will be visible at [LINK2] afterward.

• Congratulations to Tushar Shah (M.S. ECE (Computer Engineering)) and Sriram Venkatesh (M.S. CSE (Computer Engineering)) on graduating at today's commencement !

• Congratulations to Sriram Venkatesh for receiving the Honorable Mention in the Masters award for Research category, at the annual CSE end of the year celebration!!!

• Prof. Kahng [finished] his 10+ years of service on San Diego's Balboa Park Committee and the Balboa Park / Morley Field Recreation Council. More time for school!

• Prof. Kahng presented a talk on "Co-Design" at the Heterogeneous Integration Roadmap Workshop at ECTC (_.pptx with speaker notes_). He also presented a view on "Co-Design Pain Points, Tooling Gaps, and Lessons from the Past" at the ECTC Evening Panel (_.pptx with speaker notes_). [An earlier HIR Roadmap Workshop summary of Co-Design from February 22, 2018 is _here_ (.pptx with speaker notes).]

• Our 10 year-old link to RentCon Rent parameter calculation scripts are now open to all. Please find documentation and source code at link. The code is updated to be compatible with gcc 5.4.0 or higher!

• Congratulations to Sriram Venkatesh on filing his M.S. thesis!!!

• A tool that employs Multi-Armed Bandit Sampling strategies for optimal EDA tool allocation in a resource-constrained environment has been developed by the students in ABKGroup. A link to the code, as well as complete documentation on how to use it, can be found at link.

• Congratulations to Lutong Wang and Bangqi Xu for winning first place in the ISPD-2018 Initial Detailed Routing contest with "TritonRoute". [JSOE news] [cached local copy]

• Kwangsoo Han and Sriram Venkatesh received the Best Paper award at ISPD-2018 for the paper "Prim-Dijkstra Revisited: Achieving Superior Timing-driven Routing Trees" (link). [CSE department news] [cached local copy]

• Congratulations to Jonas Chan on filing his Ph.D. thesis!!!

• Prof. Kahng's ASP-DAC 2018 keynote, "Quality, Schedule, and Cost: Design Technology and the Last Semiconductor Scaling Levers" (Powerpoint source with speaker notes included).

• Semiconductor Industry: An Interview with Prof. Andrew Kahng, by Chosun Media Group (link).

• Congratulations to Bangqi Xu on passing his ECE Prelim Exam today!!!

• Paul McLellan's blog post regarding Prof. Kahng's Distinguished Lecture Series talk at Cadence Design Systems, "Andrew Kahng on the Last Semiconductor Scaling Levers", October 18, 2017. [cached local copy]

• Prof. Kahng's comments in a recent DAC-2017 Roundtable: [Using Machine Learning in EDA] [cached local copy] , [Machine Learning Popularity Grows] [cached local copy]

• Congratulations to Jonas Chan on passing his Ph.D. defense!!!

• DAC-2017 panel on EDA Research Funding organized by Prof. Kahng - slides posted here with permission of panelists!

• Prof. Kahng's keynote talk at the ANSYS Executive Breakfast, "Machine Learning in EDA: Opportunities and Value Propositions" (slides)

• Prof. Kahng received the Cadence Academic Collaboration Award at the DAC-2017 opening session (slide) (picture)

• Prof. Kahng's IWLS-2017 keynote talk, "DA Perspectives and Futures: An Update" (slides)

• Congratulations to Jiajia Li on filing his Ph.D. thesis!!!

• Congratulations to Jiajia Li on passing his Ph.D. defense!!!

• Congratulations to Kwangsoo Han on passing his University Qualifying Examination!!!

• The kickoff workshop of the new Center for Design-Enabled Nanofabrication (C-DEN) was held at the Cadence Design Systems campus in San Jose. The center website is at [C-Den website] and the workshop program is at [C-Den agenda]. (If your company isn't a member yet, please contact Prof. Kahng!)

• The inaugural Design Automation Futures Workshop ("CANDE 2.0") organized by Profs. Kahng and Koushanfar with IEEE CEDA was held at Mentor Graphics in Fremont. The program is here: [DAFW agenda] [cached local copy]

• Congratulations to Siddhartha Nath on passing his Ph.D. defense.

• SIA has announced the publication of ITRS2.0 (2015 edition)! ABKGroup members provided System Integration chapter contents.

• Congratulations to Lutong Wang on passing his ECE Prelim Exam today!!!

• A. B. Kahng, "Andrew Kahng on Industry-Academia Cooperation" (blog post about April 6 CDNLive talk, San Jose, CA).
  [web_cache (pdf)]

• The Linear and Integer Programming Made Easy book (Professor T. C. Hu, published by Springer) is now available online (link)

• A. B. Kahng, "PPAC Scaling at 7nm and Below" (blog post about April 7 Cadence Distinguished Speakers Series talk, San Jose, CA).
  [web_cache (pdf)]

• Professor Kahng presented "Toward New Synergies Between Academic Research and Commercial EDA" in the Academic Track of CDNLive 2016, receiving the best paper award in the track. The slides that Cadence posted are _here_.

• A. B. Kahng, "In Search of Lost Time", Keynote Address, TAU-2016, Santa Rosa, CA.

• Congratulations to Kwangsoo Han on passing his ECE Prelim Exam today!!!

• Congratulations to Vaishnav Srinivas on passing his University Qualifying Examination!!!

• IEEE Rebooting Computing and ITRS2.0 OSTP grand challenge white paper. (link)

• Congratulations to Wei-Ting Jonas Chan on passing his University Qualifying Examination!

• Congratulations to Jiajia Li on passing his University Qualifying Examination!

• Congratulations to Pooja Shah on filing her M.S. thesis.

• Congratulations to Hyein Lee on passing her University Qualifying Examination!

• A. B. Kahng, Presentation at SRC Summer Study (session on Power-Performance-Density-Cost Extension of CMOS Technology to Meet Evolving Demands), Atlanta, GA.

• A. B. Kahng, "Physical Synthesis 2.0", Keynote Address, IWLS-2015, Mountain View, CA.

• A. B. Kahng, "New Game, New Goal Posts: A Recent History of Timing Closure" (session on It's All in the Margins), DAC-2015, San Francisco, CA. [Invited Paper]

• Congratulations to Tuck-Boon Chan for winning the inaugural UCSD ECE Ph.D. Thesis Award!

• A. B. Kahng, "When Will the Cost of Dependability End Innovation in Computer Design?", Panel Talk, VTS-2015, Napa, CA.

• A. B. Kahng, "A Roadmap for Low-Power Design: Trends, Technology, Tools", Keynote Address, EDPS-2015, Monterey, CA.

• Congratulations to Siddhartha Nath on passing his University Qualifying Examination!

• A. B. Kahng, "Assessing Costs of Variability, Reliability and Resilience", NSF Variability Expedition / DFG SPP 1500 Colloquium, Munich, Germany.

• Congratulations to Tuck-Boon Chan for successfully defending and filing his Ph.D. thesis!

• Congratulations to Tuck-Boon Chan on passing his University Qualifying Examination.

• Congratulations to Hyein Lee on passing her ECE Prelim Exam today!!!!!!!

• Find the new ABKGroup research overview here!
  [pdf version]

• IEEE Spectrum article that mentions our ITRS roadmap work:
  [Link to IEEE Spectrum] [Local copy]

• Congratulations to Wei-Ting Jonas Chan for passing the ECE Ph.D. Prelim Exam.

• Congratulations to Vaishnav Srinivas for passing the ECE Ph.D. Prelim Exam.

• Congratulations to Seokhyeong Kang for successfully defending and filing his Ph.D. thesis.

• Congratulations to Siddhartha Nath for passing the CSE Ph.D. Research Exam.
  

• Congratulations to Jyoti Wadhwani for graduating with her ECE M.S. degree.
  

• Congratulations to Jiajia Li for passing the ECE Ph.D. Prelim Exam.
  

• Congratulations to Tuck-Boon Chan for being chosen as one of four winners of the 2013 Qualcomm Fellow-Mentor-Advisor (FMA) Fellowship, for the project "Timing Corner Optimization for Design Implementation and Signoff in Advanced Process Nodes".

• 50th DAC Recognition of 20+ years of ABKGroup: Prof. Kahng will receive several recognitions on June 5, 2013 at the 50th Anniversary Banquet of the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference. He is one of the 10 most cited authors, and the third most collaborative author, in DAC's 50-year history. He is also in the "DAC 40 club" with 40+ DAC papers, and among the 10 most prolific authors in each of DAC's fourth and fifth decades.

• Congratulations to Sherief Reda for receiving tenure at Brown University!

• Congratulations to Seokhyeong Kang and Hyein Lee for winning second place (Metric #1) and first place (Metric #2) at the ISPD-2013 Gate Sizing Contest as part of the Trident (UCSD + U. Michigan) team!
  [Full story #1] [Local copy]
  [Full story #2] [Local copy]

• Congratulations to Puneet Gupta for receiving tenure at UCLA!

• Prof. Kahng is one of the 52 members of the 2012 ACM Fellows class (link), for contributions to physical design automation and to design for manufacturability of microelectronic systems.

• A. B. Kahng, "Design-Based "Equivalent Scaling" to the Rescue of Moore's Law", University of California, Irvine, CA.

• A. B. Kahng, "DfX and Signoff: Challenges and Opportunities", Keynote Address, IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI, Amherst, MA.

• Congratulations to Seokhyeong Kang on passing his ECE qualifying examination.

• Congratulations to Kwangok Jeong for receiving the 2012 EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award (Topic Area 3).

• A. B. Kahng, "IT and Society: How Far Into the Future Can We See?", Workshop on IT and Future Society, Jeju Island, Korea

• A. B. Kahng, "Multi-Patterning Optimizations for the Long Run", ICCAD-2011 Nanolithography & IC Design/CAD in Extreme Scaling Workshop talk.

• Gate-length biasing technology from UCSD achieves cumulative energy savings at "trillion watt-hour" scale. UCSD press release [cached].

• Congratulations to Kwangok Jeong on filing his Ph.D. thesis.

• Congratulations to Kwangok Jeong on passing his Ph.D. defense.

• A. B. Kahng, "Energy Efficiency and Resilience in Future ICs", Yale University.

• A. B. Kahng, "The Future of Signoff", opening keynote, TAU-2011, Santa Barbara, CA.

• A. B. Kahng, "Futures at the Design-Manufacturing Interface", KAIST EE Department, Daejeon, Korea.

• A. B. Kahng, "Research and Graduate School Advice", CSE101, Winter 2011.

• Congratulations to Kambiz Samadi on defending and filing his Ph.D. thesis.

• Congratulations to Seokhyeong Kang on passing his ECE Prelim examination.

• The login password for ABKGroup local pages has recently been changed. If you believe that you should have access, but have not been notified the password change, please contact ABK or Seokhyeong.

• Congratulations to two members of the group for recently passing milestones in the Ph.D. track:
  Rasit Topaloglu successfully defended his thesis and filed.
  Chul-Hong Park successfully defended his thesis and filed.

• "Design for manufacturability gears up for 32nm" by Richard Goering. [Full Story]

• SPIE 2008 Plenary Talk [Full Story]

• Congratulations to various members of the group for recently passing milestones in the Ph.D. track:
  Puneet Sharma successfully defended his thesis and filed.
  Chul-Hong Park passed his qualification exam.
  Kambiz Samadi passed his Prelim.

• DATE-2007 DFM tutorial slides

  • DFM Challenges and Practical Solutions in 65nm and 45nm [PDF]


• Congratulations to Rasit Topaloglu for Best Paper award in ISQED 2007!

• ICCAD 2006 Monday Panel

  • Prof. Kahng's "CAD Research, Pay now or Pay later ..." presentation.

• Prof. Andrew Kahng's talks from GSRC06 Annual Review is now online

  • Core Pillar Presentation [PPT]
  • System-Level Living Roadmap Theme Presentation [PPT]

• DAC-2006 DFM tutorial slides

  • Test structures and test chips [PDF]
  • Nano scale realities [PDF]
  • Design optimizations [PDF]
  • What's new in DFM @ DAC-2006 [PDF]

• Debate on Restricted Design Rule (RDR) and DFM at DAC06 [Full Story]

• Congratulations to Xu Xu for successfully defended his thesis and will file this week.

• Congratulations to various members of the group for recently passing milestones in the Ph.D. track:
  Sherief successfully defended his thesis and filed last week.
  Qinke successfully defended his thesis and will file this week.
  Rasit passed his UQE.
  Puneet Sharma passed his UQE.
  Chul-Hong passed his Prelim.

• "Timing Analysis Rounds The Corner To Statistics" by David Maliniak [Full Story] [Local copy]

• "90-, 65-nm yields prey to leakage" by Richard Goering [Full Story] [Local copy]

• "Panelists ponder challenges of 45 nm"[Full Story] [Local copy]

• Congratulations to Xu Xu for 1st place in Best Poster Award and Best Paper Award in BACUS 2005!

• Congratulations to Bao Liu and Qinke Wang for Best Paper award in ICCD 2005!

• "The X initiative model: Collaborative resolution of 'shared red bricks' in ITRS" by A. Fujimura and A. B. Kahng [Full Story] [Local copy]

• Congratulations to Xu Xu for passing his qualification exam!

• Congratulations to Qinke Wang for passing his qualification exam!

• Rocks Team Helps Win ISPD2005 Placement Contest by Providing Last-Minute Compute Power. [Full Story] [Local copy]

• APlace was the winner of ISPD2005 Placement Contest. [Full Story] [Local copy]

• The Match Twice and Stitch TSP heuristic published in Operations Research Letters Nov 2004 issue is currently the hottest article on Science Direct. [Local copy]

• Blurb on PhoneShare in MIT's Technology Review magazine (Oct 2004 issue, page 17). [Local copy]

• Congratulations to Yuhong Zheng for filing her M.S. thesis!

• Pursuing Excellence in DFM at UCSD: An Interview with Dr. Andrew Kahng, by Peggy Aycinena [Full Story] [Local Copy]

• Some EETimes articles on the ICCAD 2003 tutorial:

• Researchers float design-for-manufacturing strategy, Nov. 13, 2003 [Full Story]
• Statistical timing steps into spotlight at ICCAD, Nov. 17, 2003 [Full Story]
• Statistical static timing analysis ensures IC performance, Dec. 22, 2003 [Full Story]

• X-based routing broadens reach with fab move. [Full Story]

• Congratulations to Puneet Gupta and Swamy V. Muddu for completion of their M.S. degrees at UCSD!

• Manufacturing Aware Physical Design: ICCAD Embedded Tutorial Slides. [Slides]

• Congratulations to Dr. Stefanus Mantik
  for filing his Ph.D. dissertation at UCLA!

• Posters for GSRC Annual Symposium are available. [Full Story]

• 41st Design Automation Conference (DAC) Executive Committee Named. [Full Story]

• DNA array design software released! The implemented algorithms are described in papers #141 and #159, available on the conference publications page.The code can be downloaded here.

• Urgent call made for process tie-in. [Full Story]

• Kahng calls for EDA, design, mask shops to talk. [Full Story]

• Congratulations to Dr. Yu Chen for filing his dissertation (at UCLA).

• Congratulations to Dr. Mike Oliver for filing his dissertation (at UCLA).

• ASPDAC-2003 Tutorial: Physical Chip Implementation: Hot Spots and Best Practices SLIDES (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

• Congratulations to Dr. Bao Liu for filing his dissertation.