Call for EDA Competition

COMPETE FOR THE $1,000 AND JOIN THE HALL-OF-FAME

As usual in SMACD Conferences, the 2025 edition, which will take place at Istanbul, Turkiye, from the 7nd to the 10th of July, will also hold a thrilling and dynamic event where M.Sc. and Ph.D. students can compete with their best ideas, methodologies, flows, and tools with one unique yet challenging goal:

ENHANCE DESIGN AUTOMATION FOR INTEGRATED CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS

The winner(s) of the event will receive a prize of $1,000 sponsored by

HOW TO ENTER THE COMPETITION?

All participants must submit a paper (following the same SMACD 2025 submission guidelines) with a description of the methodology and/or tool, the design problem of their choice, and the solution provided by their methodology and/or tool.

The first author of the submission and presenter at the conference must be a MSc or a PhD student!

EVALUATION CRITERIA

A Judging Committee will select the winner(s) based on the quality of the paper, its presentation at the conference, and the live demonstration, using the following criteria:

• Complexity of the problem posed in the paper.
• Level of automation (e.g., fully automated, user-assisted, etc.).
• Designer interface (e.g., problem setup, result analysis, etc.).
• Applicability of the proposal (e.g., general approach or restricted to special problems, circuit classes or sizes, etc.).
• Robustness of the design solutions (e.g., against parasitics, variability, etc.) and of the proposal itself (e.g. convergence, insensitivity to input and starting values, etc.).
• Integration degree with commercial design suites and design methodologies (e.g., import and export data from these suites, usability in one or more steps of current design flows, etc.).

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Methodologies and tools related to all topics of the SMACD24 conference (e.g., Synthesis, Sizing, Optimization, Modeling and Simulation of AMS, RF, and multidomain circuits, ML and Cloud Computing EDA methodologies, EDA methodologies for Hardware Security and Emerging Devices, etc.)

IMPORTANT NOTES

• All accepted submissions in the competition will be presented by the students in special sessions and published in the conference proceedings.
• The presenters must perform a live demo of the methodologies/tools.
• SMACD organization guarantees internet connection to all participants, but required CAD tools or design kits licensing are the responsibility of each participant.
• Papers not accepted for the competition short-list will still be considered by the technical program committee for the SMACD 2024 regular sessions.