ISPD18 Contest and Cadence Academic Network Cloud Solutions

ISPD is the International Symposium on Physical Design. The ISPD contest is a well-known competition in EDA field, where the main idea is to have EDA companies sharing the industrial problems they are facing to the academic community to drive practical research direction. At the beginning of the contest, the hosting company proposes a problem and releases a set of benchmarks associated to the problem, and then researchers from all over the world can register for the contest and work on the problem. After a couple of months, the teams who come out with the best solutions are invited to present their solutions at ISPD  where the contest ranking is announced.

The 2018 ISPD contest was organized by Cadence researchers and developers: Wen-Hao Liu, Gracieli Posser, Stefanus Mantik, William Chow and Yixiao Ding. The proposed problem for this contest is the initial detailed routing, which is a critical problem for advanced node enablement, like 7nm, 5nm, 3nm technology nodes. Therefore, one of the objectives of this contest is to drive practical detailed routing researches to consider real design rules, memory scalability, and runtime scalability. Moreover, we want to attract talent students to EDA field and address the detailed routing challenges we are struggling with by this contest. Here is the contest website where you can get more information: http://www.ispd.cc/contests/18/index.htm.

For this year, the contest had 33 participant teams, which is the record high since the first ISPD contest starting at 2005:

• These teams are from 9 countries/regions: USA, Taiwan, China, Canada, Korea, Italy, Brazil, Bangladesh, Hong-Kong.
• Around 100 students plus professors participated to the contest.

Cadence Academic Network provided a huge support to this contest and it was greatly appreciated by the organizers. As the contest results were evaluated through the Cadence tool Innovus, all participants needed Cadence licenses and those were provided to all of them through Cadence Academic Network.

Cadence cloud solution was first introduced at this contest, participants could login to a workspace with preinstalled Cadence tools through the AWS cloud and start working on their data with high, reliable and fast cloud solution. Cadence Academic Network has largely contributed to this contest and drove the educational solutions and academia into a new era of innovation. 

Cadence was represented by the contest organizers during ISPD by a published paper, where the contest problem and benchmarks used in the contest were introduced. The contest paper usually impacts the EDA community largely and will drive the next couple of years researches in this area. For example, below there is a list of the citation numbers of the previous contest papers. Note that, in EDA field, a paper is considered as a high-impact paper if it has more than 10 citations.

• ISPD 2005 (>90)
• ….
• ISPD 2011 (45)
• ISPD 2012 (44)
• ISPD 2013 (21)
• ISPD 2014 (32)
• ISPD 2015 (26)

The ISPD conference was held on March 25 - 28, 2018 in Seaside, California. The paper was presented during the conference, by Wen-Hao Liu, as the pictures below are showing. 

During the presentation, the contest problem, benchmarks and evaluation were introduced and discussed. After that, the top 5 ranking teams were announced and each of them had a short presentation to introduce their innovation to the problem addressed by this contest:

Congratulations to all teams for the great work! Below are the 1^st and 2^nd place teams receiving the plates:

                                                                                                                        Wen-Hao Liu with the 1^st place group

                                                                                                                     Wen-Hao Liu with the 2^nd place group