University of Utah electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Tsung-Wei Huang was recently awarded Best Paper at the 2021 ACM International Workshop on Timing Issues in the Specification and Synthesis of Digital Systems. Huang received the award for the paper he co-authored entitled “GPU-accelerated Path-based Timing Analysis.” The paper has also been accepted by the 2021 IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference.
“Winning this award is very encouraging,” Huang said. “This is a premier conference in timing analysis and is recognized by industrial people from major CAD companies like Intel, Synopsys, Cadence, and Qualcomm.”
Huang’s research introduces a new algorithm that largely improves the speed and accuracy of path-based analysis by utilizing graphic processing units. PBA is critical for achieving accurate timing results in a wide variety of technologies but has traditionally been time-consuming to implement and has limited designers’ ability to apply it to their design. Huang’s algorithm will help overcome this challenge as well as improve scalability.
Huang believes his research will accelerate innovation across the industry and is working to make it open source to promote collaboration and facilitate its adoption.
“I would like it to eventually be open source so that it can benefit the entire community,” Huang said. “When you build something and people start using your tool in their daily life, it feels like a great achievement. It’s rewarding and the results often facilitate exciting research collaborations between academia and the industry.”