A cross-institutional research team supervised by Professor Bei Yu from Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), in collaboration with National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) and Giga Design Automation Co., Ltd., has won First Place in Problem C at the 2025 ICCAD CAD Contest—one of the world’s most prestigious competitions in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). The team was officially recognized for this outstanding victory during the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD 2025), which successfully concluded on October 30, 2025, in Munich, Germany.

Under the supervision of Dr. Yun Shao, Professor Bei Yu, and Professor Chun-Yao Wang, the team achieved the global championship, ranking #1 among nearly 50 teams worldwide. They competed in Problem C, titled “Incremental Placement Optimization Beyond Detailed Placement: Simultaneous Gate Sizing, Buffering, and Cell Relocation.” Designed by NVIDIA, this topic addressed critical challenges in integrated circuit physical design, tasking contestants with balancing timing, power, and area through a coordinated approach integrating placement optimization, gate sizing, and buffering techniques.

The contest featured a rigorous three-stage evaluation process—Alpha, Beta, and Final tests—where teams were ranked based on the performance of their source code. The joint team’s solution demonstrated exceptional engineering quality and efficient runtime performance across all phases. By implementing novel techniques that fused GPU-based multi-objective optimization with evolutionary algorithms, they secured the First Prize of NT$70,000. This remarkable achievement highlights the strong collaboration between CUHK and NTHU, showcasing the team’s technical excellence, cutting-edge research, and growing global influence in the EDA community.

About ICCAD Contest

The CAD Contest at ICCAD is a challenging, multi-month, research and development competition, focusing on advanced, real-world problems in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). It is open to multi-person teams world-wide. Each year the organizing committee announce three challenging problems in different topic areas provided by industrial companies. Contestants can participate in one or more problems. The prizes will be awarded at an ICCAD special session dedicated to this contest.

Since its inaugural year of 2012, the CAD Contest at ICCAD has been attracting more than a hundred teams per year, fostering productive industry-academia collaborations, and leading to hundreds of publications in top-tier conferences and journals. The contest undoubtedly boosts EDA research and keeps enhancing its impact.

Contest Website: http://iccad-contest.org/
Award link: https://www.iccad-contest.org/2025/Winners.html

Team Members

CUHK

• Fangzhou Liu
• Supervisor: Bei Yu

National Tsing Hua University

• Wuqian Tang
• Bo-Ying Wang
• Han-Wen Tsao
• An-Chieh Shen
• Supervisor: Chun-Yao Wang

Giga Design Automation

• Supervisor: Yun Shao

Professor Huang Jie, Choh-Ming Li Research Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, and Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), has been elected an International Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), in recognition of his remarkable contributions in the field of control science and engineering.

Professor Huang said: “It is a profound honour to be elected an International Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and I accept it with deep gratitude and humility. My heartfelt thanks go to my friends, colleagues and family for their unwavering support, and especially to the members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering for the great trust they have placed in me.”

Professor Huang is a world-renowned scholar in control and automation engineering. He received his diploma from Fuzhou University and his Master’s and PhD from Nanjing University of Science and Technology and the Johns Hopkins University, respectively. After his doctoral studies, he held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University. Before joining CUHK, Professor Huang worked in industry in the USA. In 1995, he joined the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at CUHK and is now its Choh-Ming Li Research Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, and Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Engineering. He was appointed to the Yangtse Scholar Professorship in 2003 and as a State Specially Recruited Expert in 2012.

Professor Huang’s research interests lie in control theory and applications, robotics and automation, computational intelligence, game theory, and guidance and control of flight vehicles. He received Second Prize in the State Natural Science Prize in 2010 and a Croucher Senior Research Fellowship award in 2006. He has received the best paper award at several international conferences and the best paper award (theory category) from Unmanned Systems in 2022. He was elected an HKIE Fellow in 2017, a Chinese Association of Automation (CAA) Inauguration Fellow in 2010, an IFAC Fellow in 2009 and an IEEE Fellow in 2004. He has received the CAA Excellent PhD Thesis Supervisor Award twice.

CAE International Members are elected by current Members of the CAE. They must be internationally recognised scholars or experts with extraordinary technical knowledge and accomplishments in the art and science of engineering. They must have also made significant contributions to promoting the development of and international collaboration in engineering in China.