USF doctoral students Anirudh Iyengar and Hamid Reza Motaman received awards at the PhD Forum at the Design Automation Conference. Anirudh received the "PhD Forum Best Poster – Presentation" award for his poster titled "Spintronic memory towards Secure and Energy-Efficient Computing". Hamid received ''PhD Forum Popular Choice' award for his poster titled "Domain Wall Memory-Layout, Circuit and Synergistic Systems". Both will receive a $300 cash prize and a certificate. Anirudh and Hamid are third year PhD students in LOGICS lab working with Professor Swaroop Ghosh.
The PhD Forum at the Design Automation Conference is a poster session hosted by ACM SIGDA for PhD students to present and discuss their dissertation research with people in the EDA community. It has become one of the premier forums for PhD students in design automation to get feedback on their research and for industry to see academic work in progress: hundreds of people attended the last forums. Participation in the forum is competitive with acceptance rate of around 30%. The forum is open to all members of the design automation community and is free-of-charge and is co-located with DAC to attract the large DAC audience.