UT ECE graduate students  Jhih-Rong Gao, Bei Yu, Xiaoqing Xu, and their advisor Prof. David Z. Pan won the 2nd Place Award at the ICCAD'13 CAD Contest in Mask Optimization. There are 87 teams from 9 regions around the world participated in the ICCAD'13 CAD Contest, which has three distinct contest problems. This mask optimization problem and benchmarks are provided by IBM, to advance the state-of-the-art of IC design for manufacturing (DFM).

The software developed by the UT team, UTOPC, achieves the second best overall performance and the best process variation band.

ICCAD is the premier conference devoted to technical innovations in electronic design automation. ICCAD 2013, held on Nov. 18-21 in San Jose, CA, marks its 32nd anniversary. For more information about ICCAD contest, visit http://iccad.com/2013/2013_cad_contest_at_iccad