The aim of the contest is to promote innovation in EDA, by providing a venue for individuals and teams to showcase their software.

Criteria for entry to the EDA contest in VLSI Conference 2010 For VLSI 2010,

we solicit entries for the EDA software contest from full-time graduate and undergraduate students and engineers from industry and research establishments. Entries are subject to the following criteria:

The design and implementation should have taken place within 24 months prior to the submission deadline, certified so by the submittors.

• No prior submission of this work should have been made in any conference.
• The software should be operational, and demonstrated at venue with appropriate data sets
• It is expected that participants will take necessary clearance from their institutes or organizations.

The software and associated rights will remain the property of the submittors. The conference will have the right to publish the abstract and/or the full final written submission at its site and its distributions. It is the responsibility of the submittors to associate patent and copyright information alongside the submitted written material, if applicable.

EDA Design Contest scope

The software can be for the planning, design, test, verification and analysis of analog, digital, or programmable circuits and systems. Submitted entries must be working pieces of software. The target fields for the software include:

• Digital Integrated Circuits
• Analog Integrated Circuits
• FPGA based designs
• Computer Architectures/ Processors
• Reconfigurable Computing Systems
• SoC / Platform-based designs
• Embedded Systems
• MEMS/Optics/Bio-Chips
• Innovative Design Methodologies, Manufacturing Test and Verification Techniques.

Contest Categories

There will be a single category for deciding the prizes: Operational software. Proposals or concepts will not be entertained. The entry must be accompanied with test data sets that can be run live. Contestants need to bring necessary hardware (laptop, desktop, etc) and 3rd party tools to be able to perform the live demonstration. Contestants should ensure that they have necessary approvals if their demo uses commercial software or any other copyrighted material.

Contestants must submit a proposal, based on which a subset of the entries will be asked to make a live presentation (demo) of the software during the conference. Judges will make a decision based on the final presentation, independent of the initial proposal (i.e. the initial ranking/marking will not be carried forward). Each team would be given 20 minutes to demonstrate their software. They may use powerpoint presentation slides, charts, etc. to assist their demo.

Evaluation Criteria

A panel of experts from industry and academia will judge the submissions. Submitted designs will be reviewed in a process similar to the review process for the technical papers. If deemed appropriate, the panel may award entries from students and industry professionals separately. The following list provides some of the criteria that will be applied in the selection of entries:

• Motivation/Justification for submission
• Reliability of the software (correctness)
• Quality of implementation (robustness)
• Performance of the implementation (runtime, memory)
• Novelty of algorithm or architecture
• Development strategy (software design/construction/test process and tools usage)

Your abstract/proposal submission should contain the following:

• description of the problem
• description of previous solutions to the problem, if any
• description of the solution adopted, pointing out the novelty of the strategy adopted, and some indication of the quality and superiority of the results over prior solutions
• details of software implementation
• If your project uses modules/codes that are available from others, say the public domain, it should be clearly disclosed.

The abstract should be limited to 4 pages. The entries are not anonymous, so you should include author/programmer name and affiliations.

The final submission must have

1. A written report, which must cover the following (much like a full paper)
   • description of the problem to be solved
   • description of prior solutions to this problem, and their shortcomings
   • description of the solution adopted in the software
   • description of the sample data used for the demo
   • description of results
   • comparison with previous results
   • explanation of data structures and algorithms used, and the control and data flow of the software
   • description of the strategy, tools and processes used for the development and testing of the software
   • accuracy (correctness, quality of results), runtime performance and capacity graphs/tables, if any
   • conclusion, limitations, future directions
2. A demonstration (with accompanying presentation, if required) which shows
   • live start-up, execution and successful termination of the software
   • display of results for sample results
   • execution of software for variations from the sample, as called out by the judges
   • execution on erroneous inputs
   • execution on large data-sizes, if feasible

Submissions

VLSI conference does not require transfer of any intellectual property rights. However, it assumes that any submitted software can be publicly shared and any right protection required is done by the participants or their organizations prior to the submission.

Your submission should meet the following requirements:

1. The cover page should include
   • title of the design
   • authors and affiliations
   • speaker
   • mailing address, Phone No., Fax No., and e-mail address of the contact author
   • area of the application and implementation method
   • contribution of each group, if the prototype is jointly developed with non-academic parties
2. The summary is requested to be written within 4 single spaced pages, including figures, tables, and references.
3. It is strongly recommended that measured experimental results and a chip micrograph or a photograph of the hardware prototype should be included. If the experimental results and the photograph have not been prepared before the deadline of submission, the authors can send the revised paper including them later.
4. Date of Submission: 16^th August, 2009
   
   For further questions, please contact the Design Contest Chair: Nagendra Krishnapura ([email protected])