Dr. Luca Amaru Receives Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award

Dr. Luca Amaru, Synopsys R&D engineer in DG’s Logic Synthesis team, has received the prestigious Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award. The paper, “Majority-Inverter Graph: A New Paradigm for Logic Optimization,” was co-authored with Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardon (University of Utah, Salt Lake City) and Giovanni De Micheli (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland). It appeared in the IEEE Transactions in Computer-Aided Design (CAD), the reference journal for technical papers in this space.

The IEEE Council on EDA sponsors the annual award. It is given to papers published in the previous two years based on the “quality, originality, level of contribution, subject matter and timeliness of the research.” Members then vote among the nominees. Letters of support for Dr. Amaru’s paper included two from Synopsys. Patrick Vuillod, Synopsys Scientist in DG, said “… this paper will have a strong impact in logic synthesis … “, and Antun Domic, Synopsys CTO, stated “… [it] contains significant new insights into … efficient representations and logic minimization …”

Excellence in logic synthesis technology is a cornerstone of the Design Group’s market leading business in synthesis and physical design. Luca’s paper presents a new approach to logic synthesis, based on majority functions. These structures are applicable not only to CMOS logic gates, but also to Super Conducting circuits based on Josephson Junctions.

Dr. Luca Amaru is responsible for designing data structures and algorithms for logic synthesis tools. He joined Synopsys in January 2016. Previously, he was a research assistant at EPFL, Integrated Systems Laboratory, and a visiting researcher at Stanford University in Palo Alto. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne in 2015. He holds a double master’s Degree in EE from the Politecnico di Torino and the Politecnico di Milano in Italy, and a BS degree from the Politecnico di Torino. Dr. Amaru is the author of over 70 scientific articles, and the inventor or coinventor on nine patents.

Antun Domic contributed to this article.