UMD Team Led by Yu Named Best Paper Award Finalists at DAC 2025

The collaborative research effort led by Professor Cunxi Yu from the University of Maryland's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, titled "BoolE: Exact Symbolic Reasoning via Boolean Equality Saturation," has been selected as a Best Paper Finalist at the prestigious 2025 Design Automation Conference (DAC'25) - 62nd DAC, Chips to Systems Conference.

The paper introduces a groundbreaking method leveraging Boolean equality saturation to achieve exact symbolic reasoning, specifically addressing the most time-consuming stage in chip design—verification. BoolE significantly accelerates arithmetic data path verification, achieving orders of magnitude improvements in runtime performance.

The team consists of UMD researchers, including PhD students Jiaqi Yin and Zhan Song as co-first authors, visiting PhD student Chen Chen, and Qihao Hu, a former research intern who will join as a PhD student in Fall 2025.

The DAC Design Automation Conference is widely recognized as the most prestigious conference in electronic design automation, attracting leading researchers and industry experts globally. Being recognized as a Best Paper Finalist highlights the exceptional quality and potential impact of our work.

Yu joined the ECE Department in 2023, and has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Best Paper Award at DAC 2023, the Best Paper Award at ASPLOS 2025, three additional best paper nominations, and the NSF CAREER Award in 2021.

Published July 2, 2025