Dr. Jason Cong of UCLA, the 2024 Phil Kaufman Award recipient
Yes, Dr. Jason Cong of UCLA is the 2024 Phil Kaufman Award recipient, widely recognized for his contributions to FPGA design automation technology and electronic system design education from circuit to system levels with widespread industrial impact.
Please keep the date open for the award ceremony and banquet honoring Dr. Cong. The event will be held on the evening of Wednesday, November 6, at the Hayes Mansion in San Jose. More details will come soon from the event co-sponsors –– the Electronic System Design Alliance, a SEMI technology community, and the Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Dr. Cong serves as the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence Professor at the UCLA Computer Science Department, and is a former department chair, with a joint appointment from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He is the director of the Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC) and director of the 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, developer of 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.”
Dr. Cong 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.
About the Phil Kaufman Award
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. The award was established as a tribute to Phil Kaufman, the late industry pioneer who turned innovative technologies into commercial businesses that have benefited electronic designers. The 2023 recipient was Dr. Lawrence T. Pileggi, Coraluppi Head and Tanoto Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
We will soon announce the Phil Kaufman Hall of Fame, also co-sponsored by the ESD Alliance and IEEE CEDA, acknowledging deceased members of our industry who made major contributions but did not receive the Phil Kaufman Award during their lifetime.
About the ESD Alliance
The Phil Kaufman Award and the Phil Kaufman Hall of Fame are only two of the many programs we provide our members. The ESD Alliance focuses on initiatives and activities that bring value to our entire industry:
- Coordinating and amplifying the collective and regional voices of our industry.
- Continually promoting the value our industry delivers to the global semiconductor and electronics industry.
- Addressing and defending threats and reducing risks to our industry.
- Achieving efficiencies for our industry.
- Marketing the attractiveness of the design ecosystem as an ideal industry for pursuing a career.
- Enabling networking, sharing and collaboration across our industry.
Contact me at bsmith@semi.org or Paul Cohen at pcohen@semi.org with questions.
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