Nominations for the 2021 DAC Under-40 Innovators Award

The Under-40 Innovators Award recognizes up to five young innovators (nominees should be 40 years or younger in age as of June 1, 2021) who are movers and shakers in the field of design and automation of electronics.

Click here to submit a nomination for the DAC Under-40 Innovators Award.

From beyond the traditional automation around chip implementation, design automation is rapidly expanding to new areas such as neuromorphic computing, biological systems, cyber-security and cyber- physical systems. Within the electronics industry, the advent of new technologies and alternate scaling approaches using new integration approaches are emerging as traditional CMOS technology scaling slows down.

Young innovators are redefining and shaping the future of the design automation field in industry, research labs, start-ups and academia, and DAC wants to recognize the best and brightest.

Previous Winners:

57th DAC:

Kris Breen, Director of Customer Enablement at Mentor, a Siemens Business
Shimeng Yu, Georgia Institute of Technology
Jianyi Meng, Vice President of T-Head Semiconductor, and the Research Scientist of Alibaba Group.

56th DAC:

Yunji Chen, Full professor, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Huichu Liu, Staff Research Scientist, Intel Corporation
Rasit Onur Topaloglu, Senior Hardware Developer & Program Manager, IBM Corp.
Robert Wille, Professor, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Vijay Raghunathan, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University

55th DAC

David Atienza, Associate Professor at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Sheng Li, Platform Architect at Google
Arijit Raychowdhury, Associate Professor at Georgia Tech
Yu Wang, Associate Professor of Tsinghua University and co-founder of DeePhi Tech
Zhiru Zhang, Associate Professor at Cornell Univ.

54th DAC:

John Arthur, Research Staff Member and Hardware Manager, IBM Research – Almaden
Paul Cunningham, Vice President of R&D, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Douglas Densmore, Associate Professor, Boston Univ.
Yongpan Liu, Associate Professor, Tsinghua Univ.
Sasikanth Manipatruni, Physicist/Engineer, Intel Corp.

Nomination criteria:

The Under-40 Innovators Award is open to people in industry or academia with technical contributions of notable impact in the field of design and automation of electronics. Nominees are individuals who have made their contributions through work within an individual organization, to the design automation community and to the broader society.
Nominees from industry with technical contributions to actual product development in the field of design and automation of electronics are especially encouraged.
The award is intended for specific contributions such as commercial products, software or hardware systems, or specific algorithms or tools incorporated into other systems widely used by industry and academia. Nominations that emphasize only metrics such as number of publications, patents, and citations will not be sufficient. The impact as measured by commercialization and/or wide adoption of the nominee’s contributions is required.
The nomination for this award should include a one-page summary (fewer than 500 words) of the nominee’s technical work with specific emphasis on the impact of the work.
The nomination must include a cover page with the email address, daytime telephone number and date of birth of the nominee.
All nominations should be supported by at least three letters of recommendation.
One of those letters of recommendation needs to be from a leader inside the nominee’s organization.
Self-nominations are not allowed.

The winners will be recognized at the award sessions at the 58th DAC July 11-15, 2021 at Moscone Center West in San Francisco, CA.

Nomination opens January 15, 2021 and must be received by April 30, 2021. Click here to submit a nomination for the DAC Under-40 Innovators Award.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Can a nominee’s contribution be part of a larger team effort?
Yes. Many impactful research and commercial contributions are team efforts. If the nominee’s effort to the team is substantial, please articulate the contribution towards this team-effort.

2. How do we highlight a nominee’s contributions that are not well documented in external publications?
A nominee’s internal recognitions within the organization or supporting letters of senior technical articulating contributions to internal or external products can be used to support these nominations. The award is intended to recognize all individuals making valuable contributions to the community, especially those that remain hidden within an organization.

3. Is the award limited to contributions within industry and commercial products?
No, academics with substantial contributions to technology transfer or community impact (open source tools, widely-used courseware, high-impact outreach/diversity programs) will be considered.

4. Can you provide examples of nominee contributions that will be recognized ?

Wide adoption of the nominee’s work in commercial products
Tools/methodologies developed by nominee that have had significant impact within their organization
Methodologies/tools developed in academic environment that have been widely used by other practitioners and researchers.
New start-ups based on nominee’s technical leadership
Creation of new technical areas that broaden the reach of design automation methodologies

DAC is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

DAC 2021 | July 11-15 | San Francisco

Nominations for the 2021 DAC Under-40 Innovators Award

Previous Winners: