IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2017 - 95

the field of electronic design automation (EDA). Since its inaugural year
of 2012, the CAD contest at ICCAD
has been a worldwide competition,
conducted with joint sponsorship
from IEEE CEDA and the Ministry of
Education, Taiwan. In addition, in
this year, the contest also received
the financial sponsorship from the
industry, including Synopsys Taiwan
Co., Ltd., Taiwan, Cadence Design
Systems Inc., Taiwan, and MediaTek,
Inc., Taiwan.
Over the years, the CAD contest
at ICCAD has presented challenging
problems in varied topic areas, such
as, logic synthesis, physical design,
design for manufacturability, and 3D
IC design. Together with the associated real-world benchmarks and
common evaluation frameworks, the
contest problems have played a key
role in advancing the state of the
art in EDA. Additionally, they have
fostered productive industry-academia collaboration. In the past four
years, the contest has witnessed a
progressive increase in worldwide
participation: 56 teams from seven
countries/regions in 2012, 87 teams
from nine countries/regions in 2013,
93 te a m s f r om n i n e co u nt r ies/
regions in 2014, and 112 teams from
12 countries/regions in 2015. Thus
far, it has lead to more than 95 publications in top-tier conferences and
journals, which have undoubtedly
boosted EDA research and extended
the impact of the contest.
Continuing the rich tradition,
t he 2016 C A D Contest at ICC A D
attracted 135 multiperson teams
from 11 countries/regions, including Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong
Kong, Korea, India, Iran, Japan, Canada, the United States, Brazil, and
Russian Federation. In total, these
teams comprised of 317 students
and 62 professors. Contestants participated in one or more problems
in the three topic areas of a) design
verification, b) logic synthesis, and
c) design for manufacturing. Along
with the release of the contest
benchmarks, the contest results
were announced at ICCAD 2016, held
7-10 November at Austin, Texas. The

contest problems and final results
are summarized as follows.
The first topic addressed the problem of identical fault search. Injecting faults into designs is a way to
qualify a verification environment.
To improve the performance of the
qualifying process, identical faults
should be removed. In this problem,
the contestants were expected to
identify all sets of identical faults.
The evaluation was based on the correctness, the execution time, and the
memory usage. The winners were
Dao Ai Quoc, Prof. Mark Po-Hung Lin,
and Dr. Alan Mishchenko-National
Chung Cheng University, Taiwan.
The second topic addressed the
problem of nonexact projective NPNP
boolean matching. Basic boolean
matching is for NPNP-equivalence,
which negates (N) and permutes (P)
circuit inputs and outputs to achieve
circuit equivalences. The objective of this problem is to develop a
more flexible and powerful boolean
matching engine that can be widely
utilized in industry tools. The winners were Chak-Wa Pui, Peishan Tu,
Haocheng L i, Geng jie Chen, a nd
Prof. Evangeline F.Y. Young-The
Chinese University of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong.
The third topic addressed the
problem of pattern classification
for IC design space analysis. Given a
circuit layout and various markers,
contestants are asked to provide a
reduced set of representative layout
clips around these markers. Each

IEEE Embedded Systems Letters
is open for submissions. Visit mc.
manuscriptcentral.com/les-ieee.
IEEE Design & Test is open for submissions. Visit mc.manuscriptcentral.
co m /dand t and ie e e - ce da.or g /
publications/d-t/paper-submission.

such representative clip identifies
a class and has an associated set of
one or more unique layout markers.
Speed and accuracy are key aspects
to target in the solutions. The winners were Mehmet M. Isgenc, Joseph
Sweeney, Samuel Pagliarini, Mayler
Martins, and Prof. Larry Pileggi-
Carnegie Mellon University, USA.
The problems, associated benchmark suites, and final results are
available at the official contest website: http://cad-contest-2016.el.cycu
.edu.tw/CAD-contest-at-ICCAD2016/
index.html. Please keep your eyes
open for publications that are driven
by the 2016 CAD contest in upcoming
conferences and journal editions.
You are invited to participate in
the 2017 CAD contest at ICCAD!

Papers in IEEE Embedded
Systems Letters
The top-five accessed articles from
IEEE Embedded Systems Letters in
November 2016 were as follows:
■ "Energy Efficient Outdoor Light
Monitoring and Control Architecture Using Embedded System," by
Z. Kaleem, T.M. Yoon, and C. Lee
■ "Partitioning Real-Time Tasks with
Replications on Multiprocessor
Embedded Systems," by J. Denny
Lin, A. M. K. Cheng, and G. Gercek
■ "Arduino Debugger," by J. Dolinay,
P. Dostálek, and V. Vasek

UPCoMIng ConfErEnCES
(YAo-WEn ChAng,
YWChAng@ntU.EdU.tW)
*

DAC
Austin, Texas
18-22 June 2017

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

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2017