Overview of the 2017 CAD contest at ICCAD: Invited paper

The CAD Contest at ICCAD[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] is a challenging, multi-month R&D competition, focusing on modern and practical problems at the forefront of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). In its sixth year, the 2017 CAD Contest at ICCAD is among the premier worldwide academic programming contests, attracting 122 teams from 10 different regions/countries. This year, three contest problems in the areas of ECO logic synthesis, ECO routing and placement legalization for the advanced nodes are called for competition. We hope that the contest evaluation frameworks and benchmarks boost research on these critical problems and help EDA community discover novel, efficient, high-quality solutions to advance the state-of-the-art in EDA.