Opening: Introduction to CAD contest at ICCAD 2012: CAD contest

Contests and their benchmarks have become an important driving force to push our EDA domain forward in different areas lately, such as ISPD, TAU, DAC contests. To encourage better research development on timely and practical EDA problems across all domains, a new international CAD Contest is held this year under the joint sponsorship of the IEEE CEDA and Ministry of Education (MOE) of Taiwan. Three contest problems on functional ECO, placement, and litho hotspot identification are announced this year and run by industry experts from Cadence, IBM and Mentor Graphics.