The overview of 2014 CAD contest at ICCAD

Contests and their benchmarks have become an important driving force to push our EDA domain forward in different areas lately, such as ISPD, TAU, DAC contests. The annual CAD Contest in Taiwan has been held for 14 consecutive years and has successfully boosted the EDA research momentum in Taiwan. To encourage better research development on timely and practical EDA problems across all domains, CAD Contest is internationalized since 2012 under the joint sponsorship of the IEEE CEDA and Ministry of Education (MOE) of Taiwan. 2012 CAD Contest attracted 56 teams from 7 regions, while 2013 CAD contest attracted 87 teams from 9 regions. Continuing its great success in 2012 and 2013, 2014 CAD contest attracts 93 teams from 9 regions, including Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, US, Canada, Brazil, and Russian Federation.

Three contest problems on verification, placement, and mask optimization are announced this year and run by industry experts from Cadence and IBM.

Topic chair Chih-Jen Hsu of Cadence Design Systems manages the first contest problem, concentrating on efficiently solving the combinational single-output netlists. The efficiency of solving a single-output function highly depends on the CNF encoding and the SAT solving. For the first problem, contestants are required to explore the best CNF encoding and SAT solver setting to solve the most tests within the shortest runtime.

Topic chair Myung-Chul Kim of IBM manages the second problem, focusing on incremental timing-driven placement. Placement, which determines locations of circuit elements, is one of the most crucial steps in the modern IC design flow. For the second problem, contestants are required to perform local refinements on a legal design such that the total slack and worst slack are optimized.

Topic chair Rasit O. Topaloglu of IBM manages the third problem, exploring lithography mask optimization. In a circuit layout, densities of polygons within windows of interest may have a large variation across such windows in the rest of the layout. To balance the density of polygons, fills are inserted to make the density of several windows uniform. For the third problem, contestants are required to minimize the density variation with least fills.

This session will include three presentations from the contest organizers for these contest problems and an award ceremony. Each contest organizer (topic chair) will present detailed information about the corresponding contest problem, including problem description, benchmarks, and evaluation. Along with the contest, a new set of industrial benchmarks for each contest problem will be released and facilitate scientific evaluations of related research results. We expect that the benchmark suites will further play a key driving force to push the advancement of related research. Moreover, we also expect that the participants will submit their works to the subsequent top conferences to boost related research and also extend the impacts of this contest.