ISPD

On behalf of the organizing committee for the 2010 ACM International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), we are delighted to welcome you to San Francisco, California for the symposium, being held from March 14th to March 17th, 2010. Like its eighteen predecessors, the 2010 ISPD provides a premier forum to bring out emerging challenges, present cutting-edge research results, exchange implementation experiences, identify future research directions, and record advances in theoretical and empirical techniques for problems related to the physical design of VLSI and other analogous systems (such as bio-chips). Furthermore, the 2010 ISPD is co-located with the ACM International Workshop on Timing Issues in the Specification and Synthesis of Digital Systems (TAU), in an effort to further our attempts to collaborate with related events for higher impact on the electronic design automation (EDA) community.

This year we received more than 70 submissions from all over the world. After a rigorous blind review process that culminated in a full-day face-to-face meeting of the entire technical program committee, only 22 regular papers were selected for inclusion. In addition, the program is further enriched with one keynote speech and thirteen invited talks presented by distinguished researchers in both industry and academia. The scope of these talks covers all aspects of physical design---from front-end logic and physical synthesis to back-end yield optimization and design for manufacturing, from VLSI circuitry to biological systems, from digital design to analog methodologies, from on-chip optimization to beyond-die design, and from 2D synthesis to 3D integration. As a highlight of ISPD's focus on emerging applications in non-traditional domains, we are very fortunate in having Dr. Louis Scheffer from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Janelia Farm to address the physical design of biological systems. Continuing the forwardlooking theme, this keynote talk will be followed by an invited session on modern physical design challenges featuring several distinguished researchers from leading EDA vendors and a research institution. This session addresses topics in physical design flows, design planning, manufacturing, and automotive electronics. Following the successful discussions from last year, an invited session on Monday afternoon will continue the deep dive into analog design automation, with talks on the algorithmic, tool, and platform perspectives. An invited session on Tuesday morning will focus on timely research topics related to 3D ICs. Additionally, there are invited talks on chip- and package-level routing and on the impact of local interconnects in microprocessors. Since 2005, ISPD has become a crucial driving force for pushing research advancements in placement, global routing, and clock network synthesis, by holding highly competitive contests in these topics and by releasing large-scale real-world benchmark suites. This year's highperformance clock network synthesis contest continues this successful tradition and has attracted a large number of participants from all over the world. The results of this contest will be announced by the ISPD Contest Chair, along with the release of new benchmarks for clock synthesis.