Prof. David Z. Pan recently won a $410K National Science Foundation CAREER award. The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) is its most prestigious award for junior faculty using a highly competitive peer-review process. Dr. Pan’s research focuses on nanometer VLSI CAD and design/manufacturing integration.  This project will develop a synergistic CAD framework that enables holistic design and process integration. It will resort to the root causes of yield losses by developing a set of design-oriented and variation-aware manufacturing/yield models. Meanwhile, novel multi-objective design/manufacturing optimizations will be studied at various abstraction levels. The project will further investigate design and process integration issues for emerging technologies such as nanolithography and hybrid CMOS/post-CMOS processes. If successful, Professor Pan's research will help fill the critical gaps between IC design and manufacturing to further extend the scaling and economic benefits of the Moore’s Law.

This is another major recognition that Dr. Pan received in the past couple of years. He won ACM/SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2005, IBM Faculty Awards three times (2004-2006), ISPD 2007 Routing Contest Awards, etc. He has been serving as an Associate Editor for three IEEE transactions, TCAD (2006-), TVLSI (2007-), and TCAS-II (2006-), and will be the General Chair for the 2008 ACM International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), the premier conference on IC physical design.