Design automation has gained widespread acceptance by the VLSI circuits and systems design community. Advancement in computer-aided design (CAD) methodologies, algorithms, and tools has become increasingly important to cope with the rapidly growing design complexity, higher performance and low-power requirements, and shorter time-to-market demands. To encourage innovative, ground-breaking research in the area of electronic design automation, the ACM's Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) has established an ACM award to be given each year to an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation that makes the most substantial contribution to the theory and/or application in the field of electronic design automation.
 
The award consists of a certificate and a check for $1,000 and is presented at the Design Automation Conference, which is held in June/July of each year. The award is selected by a committee of experts from academia and industry in the field and appointed by ACM in consultation with the SIGDA Chair.
 
Deadline: November 30th of each year
 
Nomination requirements: Each department of any university may nominate at most two Ph.D. dissertations whose final submission date is between July 1st of the previous year and June 30th of the current year. Each nomination package must be emailed by November 30 and should consists of:

1. The PDF file of the Ph.D. dissertation. If the nominated Ph.D. dissertation is not written in English, an English translation of the entire dissertation must be included in the nomination package.
2. A statement (up to two pages) from the nominee explaining the significance and major contributions of the work.
3. A nomination letter from nominee's department chair or dean of the school endorsing the application.
4. Optionally, up to three letters of recommendation from experts in the field. These letters may be included in the nomination package or sent separately to the address below.

The nomination materials should be emailed to SIGDA-Award@acm.org (Subject: ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in EDA).
 
All standard conflict of interest regulations as stated in ACM policy will be applied (see https://awards.acm.org/conflict-of-interest). Any awards committee members will recuse themselves from consideration of any candidates where a conflict of interest may exist.
 

Past Awardees

• 2018 Xiaoqing Xu, for the dissertation "Standard Cell Optimization and Physical Design in Advanced Technology Nodes," University of Texas at Austin. Advisor: David Z. Pan.
• 2018 Pramod Subramanyan, for the dissertation "Deriving Abstractions to Address Hardware Platform Security Challenges," Princeton University. Advisor: Sharad Malik.
• 2017 Jeyavijayan Rajendran, for the dissertation "Trustworthy Integrated Circuit Design," New York University. Advisor: Ramesh Karri.
• 2016 Zheng Zhang, for the dissertation "Uncertainty Quantification for Integrated Circuits and Microelectromechanical Systems," Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Advisor: Luca Daniel.
• 2015 Wenchao Li, for the dissertation "Specification Mining: New Formalisms, Algorithms and Applications," University of California at Berkeley. Advisor: Sanjit Seshia
• 2014 Wangyang Zhang, for the dissertation "IC Spatial Variation Modeling: Algorithms and Applicaitons," Carnegie Mellon University. Advisors: Xin Li and Rob Rutenbar
• 2013 Duo Ding, for the dissertation "CAD for Nanolithography and Nanophotonics," University of Texas at Austin. Advisor: David Z. Pan
• 2013 Guojie Luo, for the dissertation "Placement and Design Planning for 3D integrated Circuits," UCLA. Advisor: Jason Cong
• 2012 Tan Yan, for the dissertation "Algorithmic Studies on PCB Routing," defended with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• 2011 Nishant Patil, for the dissertation "Design and Fabrication of Imperfection-Immune Carbon Nanotube Digital VLSI Circuits," Stanford University.
• 2010 Himanshu Jain, for the dissertation "Verification using Satisfiability Checking, Predicate Abstraction, and Craig Interpolation," Carnegie Mellon University.
• 2009 Kai-Hui Chang for the dissertation "Functional Design Error Diagnosis, Correction and Layout Repair of Digital Circuits", defended with the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, USA.
• 2008 No award is given this year.
• 2007 No award is given this year.
• 2006 Haifeng Qian of University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, for the thesis entitled "Stochastic and Hybrid Linear Equation Solvers and their Applications in VLSI Design Automation"
• 2005 Shuvendu Lahiri of Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, for a thesis entitled "Unbounded System Verification using Decision Procedure and Predicate Abstraction"
• 2004 Chao Wang of University of Colorado at Boulder, Department of Electrical Engineering, for a thesis entitled "Abstraction Refinement for Large Scale Model Checking"
• 2003 Luca Daniel of University of California, Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for a thesis entitled "Simulation and modeling techniques for signal integrity and electromagnetic interference on high frequency electronic systems,"
• 2003 Lintao Zhang of Princeton University Department of Electrical Engineering for a thesis entitled "Searching for truth: techniques for satisfiability of Boolean formulas."
• 2002 No awards were given in this year.
• 2001 Darko Kirovski from University of California, Los Angeles Department of Computer Science for a thesis entitled "Constraint Manipulation Techniques for Synthesis and Verification of Embedded Systems." The runner-up who received an honorable mention in that years ceremony was Michael Beattie of Carnegie Mellon University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for a thesis entitled "Efficient Electromagnetic Modeling for Giga-scale IC Interconnect." 
• 2000 Robert Brent Jones of Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering for a thesis entitled "Applications of Symbolic Simulation To the Formal Verification of Microprocessors."