Jason Cong
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Professor Jason Jingsheng Cong, currently chair of Department of Computer Science, UCLA, is a distinguished researcher in the area of VLSI CAD (or in other words, EDA).
In the 1990s, Jason proposed the interconnect centric design flow, emphasizing delay caused by interconnect. This work soon became acknowledged by the industry. Many of his students, including Koh-Kok Cheng, Lei He, David Pan, became renowned professors in universities. Jason himself was elected IEEE fellow in 1998 for this work.
In 2003, Jason's work 'optimality study of placement algorithms' shocked both academia and industry. It was found that wirelength driven placement - a problem that had been studied for 30 years, widely regarded as well-studied, was far from solved successfully. Jason made some artificial benchmarks with known optima, and found that existing tools and algorithms are far from optimal. This study led to extensive study on wirelength driven placement in the subsequent years. ISPD, an international conference focusing on VLSI physical design, hold placement contests for 3 successive years. Results show that placement algorithms have improved significantly over the years.
