Challenges and Opportunities for Electronic Design Automation in the Next Decade

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Electronic design automation (EDA) is a key enabling technology for the advances in information processing that we are enjoying today. EDA has provided fundamental design principles and tools empowering the exponential increase of the number of transistors on an integrated circuit chip over the past 50 years. Without EDA, it would not have been possible for billion-transistor chips to be a reality! However, the field of EDA is facing some unique challenges. On one hand, physical limit of transistor scaling limits future exponential growth in transistor density. The exorbitant cost of integrated circuit fabrication and the excessive complexity of EDA tools make it difficult to bring design automation innovations to practice. On the other hand, the recent rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence applications and emerging architectures and technologies calls for more customized solutions to designing electronic systems. This project seeks to support a workshop, titled Challenges and Opportunities for Electronic Design Automation in the Next Decade, aims to assemble a diverse group of leading researchers, from both academia and industry in the field of EDA, to discuss strategies as well as tactics in tackling the challenges in EDA. The workshop organizers will make a concerted effort to invite women, minority and other underrepresented groups to participate the workshop. Some invited speakers and panelists will be from these groups. The workshop will address key issues related to curriculum design for training the next generation EDA researchers, development of special training programs for graduate and undergraduate students, and collaboration between academia and industry. This project and the associated workshop will explore answers to overarching questions including but not limited to (i) what are the high-risk and high-return research topics, (ii) what other adjacent fields that EDA research should aggressively seek collaboration with, (iii) where the scientific findings should be disseminated in order to have the greatest impact given the interdisciplinary nature of EDA research, and (iv) where the research funding should come from and how it should be distributed to encourage more transformative research. A final report will be produced and disseminated in a premier journal in the EDA field.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.