David Liu Gets 2011 Kaufman Award

 November 8, 2011, Santa Clara, CA—EDAC and the IEEE CEDA presented the 2011 Phil Kaufman Award to David Liu for his contributions to the EDA industry. His work helped to transform an ad-hoc design process into an algorithm-driven methodology. He influenced developments in logical and behavioral synthesis and in physical design.

Walden Rhines, chairman of EDAC, opened the evening with acknowledgements to the various volunteers and committee chairs for their efforts in advancing the EDA industry. Next, he noted that the Market Statistics Service is indicating increased revenues for Q2 ’11 up 17.6 percent on a year-to-year basis. Other housekeeping notices included elections coming in April with nominations due soon. The annual CEO forecast is scheduled for February 29, ’12.

Andreas Kuehlmann, president of the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation updated the organization status. The council includes a number of other societies within the IEEE. In addition to the Kaufman award, they also host the A. Richard Newton and D. O. Pederson awards to deserving IEEE members.

Jason Cong from UCLA was the main presenter for the award to Liu. He enumerated the many contributions, accomplishments, and papers from Liu and noted that all of them contributed to today’s implementation flow. in addition to all his technical contributions, Liu also advised and mentored many students while at MIT and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2002, Dr Liu moved to Taiwan and became the president and professor of Computer Science at the National Tsing Hua University.

Some of the other commentators included Paul Huang, Kaufman awardee from 2000, Ajoy Bose from Atrenta, and Chi-Foon Chan from Synopsys. Many representatives from Taiwan-based companies attended the event to show their support and acknowledgement of Liu’s efforts.

You can watch the video of the presentation at: http://edac.org/events11/kaufman/presentation/vod.jsp