Joining the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Lab?
General Information- Bring your smiles and a copy of your transcript for interview.
- You are free to quit anytime if admitted to our group. 3 NOs policy: No question asked, no side effect, no ...!
- Currently there are 11 Ph.D. students and 13 M.S. (including 4 ºÓ¤h±M¯Z) students in our group. Typically, I admit 4-5 M.S. students per year. According to the rule in our EDA group, I will need to take at least two ºÓ¤h¦Ò¸Õ¥Í every three years.
- Notice that I am with both the EDA group and the Computer Science (CS) group. So you might want to apply to both groups to optimize your chance of entering our lab since my quotas in both groups are limited and are typically not sufficient for those who request to join our lab.
- I strongly suggest that you talk to my students about the details of our group before interviewing with me. Their contact information is available at the EDA lab at NTU.
- Typically, I don't accept students at the first interview. I strongly recommend that you really think it over after interview about your suitability for this lab.
General Requirements- High EQ, self-motivated, interested in VLSI software and hardware design, adequate programming skills, and willing to work hard (background knowledge: logic design, data structures).
- Our group is ABSOLUTELY NOT suitable for you if
- you don't have strong sense of responsibility,
- you often need somebody to push you for doing research and other matters,
- you are a so-so guy and just want to do so-so jobs (no intention to optimize your work/performance),
- you cannot or don't want to get along with others well, or
- you plan to stay in school for a long time (our current average times are 4 years for the Ph.D. degree and 2 years for the M.S. degree; if you plan to study for a longer time (e.g., 7 years) for the Ph.D. degree, our group is definitely NOT a right place for you).
M.S. Program Requirements- On-campus course requirements: (1) VLSI Physical Design, (2) Algorithms, (3) VLSI Design Automation (core course of GIEE), (4) CAD Flow (core course of GIEE), (5) VLSI Design, (6) One more course on VLSI related topics (e.g., VLSI testing, simulation, logic synthesis, formal verification, design for manufacturing, etc), (7) One course on mathematics or optimization theory (such as graph algorithms, combinatorial optimization, linear and nonlinear programming, computational geometry, numerical methods, or operations research), (8) English technical writing (finish this course in the first year). (I hope this can solidify your VLSI software as well as hardware training.)
- Off-campus course requirements: Selected training courses offered at CIC (Chip Implementation Center), NSC (in Hsinchu) during winter or summer breaks (for learning commercial CAD tools and/or VLSI design). Expenses will be paid by my NSC grants. (I hope this will make you get some knowledge about industrial VLSI CAD tools and design flow.)
- Satisfactory thesis.
Ph.D. Program Requirements- On-campus course requirements: (1) VLSI Physical Design, (2) Algorithms, (3) VLSI Design Automation (core course of GIEE, NTU), (4) CAD Flow (core course of GIEE), (5) VLSI Design, (6) One more course on VLSI related topics (e.g., VLSI testing, simulation, logic synthesis, formal verification, advanced VLSI design, etc), (7) One more course on mathematics or optimization theory, e.g., graph algorithms, combinatorial/discrete optimization, numerical methods, linear and nonlinear programming, computational geometry, or operations research, (8) English technical writing (finish this course in the first year). (I hope this can solidify your VLSI software as well as hardware training.)
- Off-campus course requirements (if not taken before): Selected training courses offered at CIC (Chip Implementation Center), NSC (in Hsinchu) during winter or summer breaks (for learning commercial CAD tools and/or VLSI design). Expenses will be paid by NSC grants. (I hope this will make you get some knowledge about industrial VLSI CAD tools and design flow.)
- Satisfactory dissertation.
- ATTENTION: Don't expect any easy publications. Should have ACM or IEEE international conference and/or journal publications to graduate. (As you can see from our publication page, we publish papers mainly in IEEE Trans. on CAD, ACM Trans. on Design Automation of Electronic Systems, IEEE Trans. on VLSI Systems, IEEE Trans. on Computers, ACM/IEEE DAC, IEEE/ACM ICCAD, ACM ISPD, ACM/IEEE ASP-DAC, ACM/IEEE DATE, and IEEE ICCD.) Paper quality, instead of paper count, is the main criterion to evaluate whether you can graduate from this group. (The current four Ph.D. graduates from our lab all have ACM/IEEE conference/journal papers sufficient for the Ph.D. graduation requirements of the Department in their very first two years, and it took them only 4 years to graduate, even a part-time student included.) Note that insignificant publications will just hurt your academic reputation/career.