General Information

The International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) provides a premier forum to exchange ideas and promote research on critical areas related to the physical design of VLSI systems. All aspects of physical design, including its interactions with architecture, behavioral- and logic-level synthesis, and back-end performance analysis and verification are within the scope of the symposium. Target domains include semi-custom and full-custom IC, regular fabrics, FPGA, and systems-on-chip/systems-in-package. Following its eighteen predecessors, the 2010 symposium highlights key new directions and leading-edge theoretical and experimental contributions to the field (see the technical program).

Press Coverage of 2010 ISPD

• IBM benchmarks prod microprocessor designers, ISPD design contest expected to spur new clock distribution schemes, EE Times, 4/2/10.
• IBM warns of 'design rule explosion' beyond 22-nm, EE Times, 3/31/10.

Best Paper Award

The best paper candidates are:

• FOARS: FLUTE Based Obstacle-Avoiding Rectilinear Steiner Tree Construction (Gaurav Ajwani, Chris Chu, and Wai-Kei Mak)
• B-Escape: A Simultaneous Escape Routing Algorithm Based on Boundary Routing (Lijuan Luo, Tan Yan, Qiang Ma, Martin D. F. Wong, and Toshiyuki Shibuya) (Best Paper Award Winner)
• Skew Management of NBTI Impacted Gated Clock Trees (Ashutosh Chakraborty and David Z. Pan)
• SafeChoice: A Novel Clustering Algorithm for Wirelength-Driven Placement (Jackey Z. Yan, Chris Chu, and Wai-Kei Mak)

Contest

Over the past five years, ISPD has organized contests in placement, global routing, and clock network synthesis, that have not only attracted enthusiastic participation from all around the globe, but have also led to significant seminal research advances in these fields. These contests have also resulted in the release of new state-of-the-art benchmark suites that have already found widespread acceptance and usage in the physical design research community. ISPD 2010 also continues this proud tradition of organizing a contest open to research groups from universities around the world. Details can be found at the contest site. The winners of the contest are:

• First Place: University of Michigan (Contango)
• Second Place: Chinese University of Hong Kong (CNSrouter)
• Third Place: National Taiwan University (NTUclock)

The 2010 ISPD was co-located with the ACM International Workshop on Timing Issues in the Specification and Synthesis of Digital Systems (TAU Workshop). The workshop was held on March 18 - March 19, 2010.

Held in Marriott Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco, California, the symposium is sponsored by ACM/SIGDA with technical co-sponsorship from IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. The symposium also receives additional support from Cadence, IBM Research, Intel Corporation, Mentor Graphics, SpringSoft, Sun Microsystems, and Synopsys.