Five Outstanding Innovators Under 40 Honored at the 54th Design Automation Conference

AUSTIN, Texas—June 19, 2017—Celebrating the present and future of innovation, the Design Automation Conference announced the five winners of the inaugural Under-40 Innovators Award at the 54th DAC. The winners, from both innovative companies as well as universities, were announced during the conference's opening keynote session at the 54th gathering of DAC, the premier conference devoted to the design and automation of electronic systems.

The Under-40 Innovators Award is sponsored by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Electronic Systems Design Alliance (ESDA), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  The award recognizes the top five young innovators, who already have made a significant impact in the field of design and automation of electronics.

"Innovation is clearly thriving among younger engineers in the design automation community," said Mac McNamara, General Chair of the 54th DAC. "EDA continues to attract some of the best and brightest young innovators because of the complex but particularly exciting problems the industry confronts year after year as it invents the future."

The inaugural honorees are:
 
John Arthur, Research Staff Member and Hardware Manager, IBM Research – Almaden
 
Arthur, working in the Brain-Inspired Computing Group at IBM Research, designs large-scale neuromorphic chips and systems as well as algorithms to train them. His work includes Stanford's Neurogrid and most recently IBM's TrueNorth project.
  
Paul Cunningham, Vice President of R&D, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
 
Cunningham is responsible for front-end digital design tools. He joined Cadence in 2011 through the acquisition of Azuro, a clock concurrent optimization company where he was a co-founder and CEO.
 
Douglas Densmore, Associate Professor, Boston Univ.
 
Densmore, who works in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Boston University, creates EDA-inspired software tools for synthetic biology. He is a founding member of the BU Biological Design Center (BDC), head of the NSF’s “Living Computing Project” and a Senior Member of the IEEE and ACM.
 
Yongpan Liu, Associate Professor, Tsinghua Univ.
 
Dr. Liu’s research interests include design automation and emerging circuits and systems for the Internet of Things (IoT). He designed the first nonvolatile processor used in both academia and industry. He received IEEE Micro Top Pick16 and best paper awards of HPCA15 and ASPDAC17.

 Sasikanth Manipatruni, Senior Staff Physicist/Engineer, Intel Corp.
Dr. Manipatruni merges physics-based design with the experimental demonstration of spintronic/photonic/quantum devices for technologies beyond advanced CMOS. He has authored more than 50 scientific articles and holds 80 patents spanning nanophotonics, medical imaging, quantum & beyond CMOS computing. He also coaches middle/high schoolers for Physics Olympiad.

Michelle Clancy, DAC Publicity Chair