By Li Panpan

(JW Insights) Jul 13 -- Dr. Zhu Yunshan, CEO of Chinese EDA supplier IC Bench(伴芯科技), won the first Most Influential Paper Award on July 13 at the International Design Automation Conference (DAC) held in Silicon Valley from July 9 to 13.

The paper "Symbolic Model Checking Using SAT Procedures Instead of BDDs" by Zhu and others won the highest honor because of its long-term important contributions to the EDA field. It created the field of Bounded Model Checking (BMC), which has been cited thousands of times, and its core algorithm has been widely used in the chip design process.

Zhu said, "I am very honored to be able to cooperate with Biere, Cimatti, Clarke, and Fujita to create a technology that has a profound impact on the EDA industry."

The DAC conference is the top event in the global EDA industry, focusing on the industrial software necessary for the chip design process. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the DAC conference, the organizers established the award for the first time to recognize the most influential research results in the conference's 60th history.

Zhu was an undergraduate at the University of Science and Technology of China and received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina in the United States. He invented the algorithm for this paper while working as a postdoctoral fellow of Professor Clarke at Carnegie Mellon University.

He founded the EDA company NextOp in the US and later founded IC Bench in Shanghai in 2020 with several co-founders.