Dr. Jason Cong to be Honored With 2024 Phil Kaufman Award

Dr. Jason Cong, Distinguished Professor and Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), will be honored with the 2024 Phil Kaufman Award for distinguished contributions to Electronic System Design (ESD).

The annual award from the Electronic System Design Alliance (ESD Alliance), a SEMI technology community, and the Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), will be presented at the Phil Kaufman Award presentation and banquet, Nov. 6 in San Jose, CA.

The organizations are honoring Dr. Cong for his sustained fundamental contributions to field-programmable gate array (FPGA) design automation technology, from circuit to system levels, with widespread industrial impact.

“Dr. Jason Cong is highly regarded in the industry for his work in FPGA synthesis and interconnect optimization and is recognized as a top researcher in the field,” said Dr. Anirudh Devgan, president and CEO of Cadence Design Systems and the 2021 Phil Kaufman Award honoree. “Along with his passion for teaching and mentoring the next generation of innovators, Jason has had a significant impact on the FPGA and EDA industries.”

“Jason Cong has made sustained, seminal contributions to design automation for FPGA designs, from chips to systems, across logic, layout, compilation, and applications, over a remarkable 30-plus-year span,” said Rob Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research, distinguished professor of CS and ECE at the University of Pittsburgh, and the 2017 Phil Kaufman Award recipient. “He is an inspiring and well-accomplished educator, mentor, and role model for generations of students who became successful faculty members, co-founders of startups, and key contributors to major EDA and semiconductor companies.”

“Dr. Cong has been a key innovator and EDA educator with outstanding technical contributions in design automation for FPGA designs, including logic, layout, compilation, and applications,” said Georges Gielen, professor at KU Leuven and past chair of the IEEE Council on EDA Awards Committee. “He has founded numerous successful startups, and with over 30 years on the faculty of UCLA, he and his numerous Ph.D. students continue to enhance the semiconductor industry.”

“The EDA industry would not be where it is today without Dr. Cong’s fundamental contributions to design automation for FPGA design and his strong role as an educator and mentor,” said Bob Smith, executive director of the ESD Alliance. “On behalf of SEMI and the ESD Alliance, I congratulate Dr. Cong on being honored with the 2024 Phil Kaufman award.”

Dr. Cong is the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence Professor at the UCLA Computer Science Department, and a former department chair, with joint appointment from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

He is the director of the Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC) and the director of VLSI Architecture, Synthesis, and Technology (VAST) Laboratory. Dr. Cong’s research interests include novel architectures and compilation for customizable computing, synthesis of VLSI circuits and systems, and quantum computing.

He has more than 500 publications in these areas, including 18 best paper awards, and four papers in the FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame. He and his former students co-founded AutoESL, which developed the most widely used high-level synthesis tool for FPGAs. The tool was renamed to Vivado HLS and Vitis HLS after Xilinx’s acquisition.

Dr. Cong is member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and the National Academy of Inventors. He is recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) University Research Award, the EDAA Achievement Award, and the ISPD Lifetime Achievement Award, and he received the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal for “fundamental contributions to electronic design automation and FPGA design methods.”

He received his bachelor of science degree in computer science from Peking University in Beijing, China, in 1985, and his master of science and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987 and 1990, respectively.

The Phil Kaufman Award honors individuals who have had a demonstrable impact on the field of electronic system design through technology innovations, education/mentoring, or business or industry leadership.