UT ECE graduate students Bei Yu, Jhih-Rong Gao, and their advisor Prof. David Z. Pan won the 2nd Place Award at the ICCAD'12 CAD Contest in Fuzzy Pattern Matching for Physical Verification. There are over 60 teams around the world participated in the ICCAD'12 CAD Contest, which has three distinct contest problems. This fuzzy patterning matching problem and benchmarks are provided by Mentor Graphics, a leading EDA company, to advance the state-of-the-art of IC design for manufacturing (DFM).

The software developed by the UT team, UTDetector, achieves the second best overall performance and the best average hit/extra ratio of a blind dataset. UTDetector incorporates a set of hybrid techniques, including multi-level machine learning and pattern matching.

ICCAD is the premier conference devoted to technical innovations in electronic design automation. ICCAD 2012, held on Nov. 5-8 in San Jose, CA, marks its 30th anniversary. For more information about ICCAD, visit http://iccad.com/.