FPL Best Paper Award

On September 11, 2019, University of Guelph professors Shawki Areibi (School of Engineering) and Gary Grewal (School of Computer Science) received the Michal Servit Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL Conference), making them the first research group to win this award two years in a row. Their paper, entitled A Deep Learning Framework to Predict Routability for FPGA Circuit Placement demonstrated how to reduce bottlenecks in the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) design process. An FPGA is an electronic circuit that remains customizable after it has been manufactured. They can be programmed and reprogrammed to perform specific functions within electronic devices. Profs. Areibi and Grewal use deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, to automatically detect the potential circuit connections that an FPGA can accommodate.

The FPL Conference is the top European conference covering the area of field-programmable logic architectures, reconfigurable computing and applications. The Michal Servit Memorial Award is presented to the most outstanding paper in the area of design algorithms, methods, and CAD (computer-aided design) tools for FPGAs and self-aware systems.

Congratulations Profs. Areibi and Grewal!