7/11/07: Prof. Pan is invited to speak at the quarterly Cadence Distinguished Seminar Series on "Synergistic Modeling and Optimization for Physical and Electrical DFM". The seminar was held at the Cadence headquarter in San Jose. Prof. Pan also visited Cadence Berkeley Lab and discussed with researchers there on our SRC-funded projects.

6/26/07: Prof. Pan wins a $410K National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

5/18/07: UTDA participates in DAC’07: Prof. Pan will give a two-hour invited talk at the Design Automation Summer School on Design and CAD for Manufacturability. Anand and Minsik will present their DAC papers on accurate waveform modeling and DFM-aware routing, respectively. Tung-Chieh (visiting scholar from NTU) will present his work on MP-tree. Kun will participate in the DAC Young Student Program. Last but not least, Minsik and Kun will demonstrate BoxRouter 2.0 at the DAC University Booth.

4/11/07: Congratulations to Minsik Cho, who has received a highly competitive IBM Ph.D. Scholarship in recognition of his academic excellence.

3/21/07: In the ISPD’07 Global Routing Contest, BoxRouter won the 2nd place in the realistic 3D category. BoxRouter was originally proposed on a DAC 2006 paper which significantly pushed the state-of-the-art, and helped to generate the renaissance of the recent routing research. There are 11 teams participated in the final contest (17 teams signed up originally from both academia and industry). BoxRouter actually completed the most number of circuits successfully for 2D and 3D categories. How to rank the quality of global routers is still controversial. No matter under what metric, BoxRouter proved itself to be one of the best. Congratulations to Minsik, the main developer of BoxRouter, and Kun and Katrina who helped in development/testing. See an EE Times article on the ISPD routing contest.

1/1/07: Tung-Chieh (Donnie) Chen joined UTDA as a visiting scholar from National Taiwan University (NTU), under the "Graduate Students Study Abroad Program" by National Science Council of Taiwan. Donnie is a PhD candidate supervised by Prof. Yao-Wen Chang at NTU. He will be with UTDA for one year. Welcome, Donnie!

10/19/06: UTDA will have a major presence at ICCAD'06, the premier conference in electronic design technology. Six graduate students will be there, including 4 co-authors (Anand, Minsik, Peng and Sean) who will present their ICCAD papers and 2 first-year graduate students (Ashutosh and Kun) who will participate in the ACM/SIGDA CADathlon programming contest. On Thursday Nov. 9, Prof. Pan will give a half-day tutorial on DFM with Dr. Chris Mack and Dr. Evanthia Papadopoulou.

10/19/06: Prof. Pan will give an Invited Talk on "Lithography and CMP Aware Routing" at the 1st IEEE Design for Manufacturability and Yield Workshop (DFM&Y), to be held on Oct. 26-27 in conjunction with the International Test Conference 2006. He will also participate in the panel - "What Will Make or Break DFM&Y", moderated by Gary Smith, Chief EDA Analyst of Dataquest.

6/30/06: Our DAC'06 paper "BoxRouter: A New Global Router Based on Box Expansion and Progressive ILP" is nominated for Best Paper Award. BoxRouter significantly pushes the state-of-the-art of global routing, a classic physical design problem with novel approach and paradigm. BoxRouter is available for download.

6/22/06: Our ICCAD'05 paper "TACO: Temperature Aware Clock-tree Optimization" is covered by EE Times on 6/19/2006 in the report "Chip designers feel the heat" by Richard Goering.

6/22/2006: Prof. Pan won the 2006 IBM Faculty Award.

6/20/06: Katrina Lu, who just finished her B.S. from UT ECE, has won the SRC Master's Scholarship to continue her graduate study and perform SRC-sponsored research under Prof. Pan's supervision.

6/20/06: Three papers are accepted by the IEEE/ACM 2006 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD). Congratulations to Anand, Minsik, Peng and Sean!

5/5/06: First PhD from UTDA! Haoxing Ren has successfully defended his PhD dissertation on "Incremental Placement for Modern VLSI Design Closure". Congratulations and we wish him all the best. Dr. Ren works at IBM EDA as a key member of its placement team.

4/22/06: Graduate students going to leading industry groups for summer internship: Minsik Cho and Sean Shi (IBM Watson), Tao Luo (AMD), Anand Ramalingam (Intel), Peng Yu (IBM SRDC).

04/19/06: Our ISPD'06 paper by A. Rajaram and D. Z. Pan, "Variation Tolerant Buffered Clock Network Synthesis with Cross Links" , is covered by EE Times on April 17, 2006 in the report "Paths to better timing analysis" by Richard Goering.

4/14/06: Three papers from our group are accepted as regular papers by the 43rd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference.

1/25/06: Prof. Pan and Minsik Cho attended ASPDAC'06 in Japan. Their paper "Fast Substrate Noise-Aware Floorplanning with Preference Directed Graph for Mixed-Signal SOCs" is nominated for Best Paper Award at ASPDAC. Only 8 papers are nominated, out of 424 submissions.

1/23/06: Prof. Pan visited Fujitsu (our research sponsor) and gave a 2-hour seminar on "Physical Design for Manufacturabiltiy". It attacted a record number of attendees (200+).

9/1/05: Prof. Pan is selected to be the winner of the 2005 ACM/SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award, "for a junior faculty member early in her or his academic career who demonstrates outstanding potential as an educator and/or researcher in the field of electronic design automation". The award will be presented at the opening session of ICCAD 2005.

9/1/05: Graduate students return to school from their summer internships: Minsik Cho (Intel), Tao Luo (AMD), Anand Ramalingam (IBM Austin Research Lab), and Peng Yu (Synopsys ATG)

8/1/05: Prof. Pan received the 2005 IBM Faculty Award.