IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Winter 2020 - 99

Find us online at http://ieee-ceda.org.

attended by a large audience who
enthusiastically interacted by posing
several questions.
Besides the technical activities,
Chip in Sampa also hosted the CEDA
Brazil Chapter annual meeting, in
which the executive committee reported on activities of the previous
12 months and presented the activities planned for the next months. In
the sequel, some new actions were
proposed and discussed, aiming to
reach a larger number of students in
Brazil. Among those, the most relevant is "CEDA Brazil Talks," to be
organized in cooperation with the
Brazilian Computer Society.

The SMACD EDA
competition
was a thrilling
event in which
students competed
by presenting
their best ideas,
methodologies,
flows, and tools.

EDA Competition at SMACD 2019
An EDA competition sponsored by
IEEE CEDA, chaired by Engin Afacan
from Kocaeli University and Fabio
Passos from Instituto de Telecomunicações, took place during the International Conference on Synthesis,
Modeling, Analysis and Simulation
Methods and Applications to Circuit
Design (SMACD) in Lausanne, Switzerland, 15-18 July 2019. The SMACD
EDA competition was a t h r illing
event in which students competed
by presenting their best ideas, methodologies, flows, and tools aimed at
improving design automation for ICs
and systems.

The competition required the submission of a full paper and a presentation at the conference, together with a
live demonstration by the first author,
who had to be an M.Sc. or Ph.D. student. The presenter also had to answer
questions from the judging committee,
which was formed by the following
experts from industry and academia:
David Atienza, EPFL (current president
of IEEE CEDA); Elena Blokhina, University College Dublin; Anton Klotz,
Cadence, Inc.; and Marco Cerchi, AMS.
This committee had to evaluate papers,
presentations, and tools according to
the complexity of the problem, level
of automation, applicability of the proposal, integration with existing tools,
and methodologies and robustness of
the design solutions.
Fourteen proposals were submitted
and competed for the awards, which
included a monetary prize of US$1,000
for first place, provided by IEEE CEDA.
The awarded contributions and presenters were "Mixed-Signal Hardware
Security Using MixLock: Demonstration in an Audio Application," by Julian
Leonhard, Sorbonne Université (second place), and "TiDeVa: A Toolbox for
the Automated and Robust Analysis of
Time-Dependent Variability at Transistor Level," by Pablo Saraza-Canflanca,
Instituto de Microelectronica de Sevilla
(first place).

Release of New Robust Design
Flow at ICCAD 2019
The IEEE CEDA Design Automation
Technical Committee (DATC) has developed an open reference design flow,
called DATC Robust Design Flow (RDF),
to facilitate research on flow-scale
methodology and cross-stage optimizations. The latest RDF-2019 development, scheduled to be released at the
IEEE/ACM International Conference
On Computer Aided Design, makes a
significant revision of the previously
reported RDF-2018 flow.
Leveraging recent academic tool
developments made in the OpenROAD
project (https://theopenroadproject
.org/), RDF-2019 adds previously missing steps, such as floorplanning, I/O
placement, power planning, and clock
tree synthesis.

IEEE COUNCIL ON ELECTRONIC
DESIGN AUTOMATION
President: David Atienza
President-Elect: Yao-Wen Chang
Past President: Shishpal Rawat
Secretary: Agnieszka Dubaj
VP Conferences: Luca Fanucci
VP Finance: Cristiana Bolchini
VP Publications: L. Miguel Silveira
VP Publicity: Vasilis Pavlidis
VP Standards: Dennis Brophy
VP Activities: Gi-Joon Nam
VP Awards: Subhasish Mitra
VP Initiatives: Jose Ayala
Council Operations Manager:
Jennifir McGillis

A number of horizontal extensions
to RDF are also achieved by incorporating additional tool options at the
static timing analysis, global placement, gate sizing, and detailed routing stages of the flow.
RDF-2019 provides significantly
enhanced support of and interoperability with industry-standard tools
and design formats such as LEF/
DEF, SPEF, Liberty, SDC, and so on. Be
sure to check out the official Github
repository of IEEE CEDA DATC at
https://github.com/jinwookjungs/
datc_robust_design_flow.

NOCS 2019
The International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip (NOCS) (17-18 October
2019) was a premier event dedicated to
interdisciplinary research on on-chip,
package-scale, chip-to-chip, and datacenter rack-scale communication
technology, architecture, design methods, applications, and systems. NOCS
brings together scientists and engineers
working on network-on-chip innovations and applications from interrelated research communities, including
discrete optimization and algorithms,
computer architecture, networking, circuits and systems, packaging, embedded systems, and design automation.
The conference program included
several keynotes, tutorials, and special
and regular paper sessions with participants from industry and academia.

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

WINTER 2020

99
http://www.ieee-ceda.org https://github.com/jinwookjungs/datc_robust_design_flow https://github.com/jinwookjungs/datc_robust_design_flow https://theopenroadproject.org/ https://theopenroadproject.org/
IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Winter 2020

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