ACM announced that Jason Cong, the holder of the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, is the recipient of the 2024 ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award . Cong is recognized for fundamental contributions to the design and automation of field-programmable systems and customizable computing.

The ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award recognizes individuals or groups who have made surprising, disruptive, or leapfrog contributions to computing ideas or technologies. The award is accompanied by a $100,000 prize with financial support provided by Microsoft.

During his career in both academia and industry, Cong developed an extraordinary array of tools to automate integrated circuit design, mostly focused on tools for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs are special integrated circuits that can be programmed after they have been manufactured. The ability of FPGAs to change their functionality after manufacturing has made them part of the standard hardware in many applications including data centers, telecommunications, aerospace, defense, and automotive engineering.

While FPGAs are programmable, creating the configuration files for them is a complex task and difficult for users to complete. Cong has spent much of his career building tools to address this problem. For example, his work has made it possible to use software programming languages such as C or C++ to program an FPGA, significantly broadening their accessibility and usability. In addition to working out the basic algorithms, Cong and his students have created commercial tools that embed these algorithms to power the FPGA design tools in use today.

In the late 1990s, Cong worked on how to map logic onto the look-up tables that are the building blocks of FPGAs. This was a difficult problem which was solved using heuristics. Cong and his students made a major theoretical breakthrough when they showed this problem could be solved exactly in polynomial time. This insight led to the creation of Aplus Design Automation to commercialize this technology, and now it is used in all FPGA synthesis tools.

While Cong’s early work enabled designers to use a hardware description language such as Verilog to design FPGAs, it was still difficult for software application engineers to program these circuits. In the 2000s, Cong’s group started working on high-level synthesis techniques to enable FPGAs to be programmed from C/C++ descriptions. This successful effort led to AutoESL, a spin-off from his lab at UCLA, which was acquired by Xilinx Inc. in 2011 (now part of Advanced Micro Devices). AutoPilot, a commercial product based on the AutoESL technology, is the basis of AMD/Xilinx’s high-level synthesis tools today.

Having created these tools, Cong applied them to the field of customizable domain-specific computing, where he and his team designed a wide range of domain-specific hardware accelerators with FPGAs, including deep learning, medical image processing, genomic sequencing, data compression, satisfiability solving, and many other computationally intensive tasks. An important benefit of these customized computing solutions is that they have shown drastically improved energy efficiency over conventional CPU-based computing approaches.

The ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award recognizes individuals or groups who have made surprising, disruptive, or leapfrog contributions to computing ideas or technologies. Recipients of the award are expected to give the ACM Breakthrough Lecture at a major ACM conference. The award is accompanied by a $100,000 cash prize, with financial support provided by Microsoft.

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Jason Cong is the holder of the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. Cong’s research interests include design automation of VLSI circuits and systems, customizable computing, quantum computing, and highly scalable algorithms. He has published over 500 research papers, led over 100 research projects, and received several patents.

A graduate of Peking University, Cong earned MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His honors include the Phil Kaufman Award, the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, and the ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation, among many others. He is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the US National Academy of Engineering.