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Yiran Chen and Hai “Helen” Li Receive Numerous Awards at Design Automation Conference
Five honors from ACM and IEEE groups highlight Duke ECE leaders’ lasting influence on AI hardware research.
Two faculty members from Duke Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have been recognized with several honors at this year’s Design Automation Conference (DAC), a flagship conference in the electronic design automation (EDA) community. The awards highlight their long-standing leadership and contributions to developing hardware and software for artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Yiran Chen, the John Cocke Distinguished Professor of ECE, and Hai “Helen” Li, the Marie Foote Reel E’46 Distinguished Professor and chair of ECE, received five total awards at DAC 2026, set for Long Beach, Calif., from July 26-29.
Chen received:
- Distinguished Service Award from Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA)
- Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award from Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)
Li received:
- Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Award from DAC
- Distinguished Service Award from IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA)
Together, Chen and Li received:
Furthering the duo’s impact on the field and demonstrating their ability to train and educate future leaders, Chen’s former student Zhiyao Xie, who graduated in 2022 and is now an assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), received the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award.
Chen and Li have collaborated for two decades on device-level innovation, architecture design and system-level integration, contributing to advances in memory technologies, neuromorphic computing and efficient hardware for AI at the edge.
At Seagate Technology, they designed the first spintronic magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) chip fabricated using commercial semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the United States, demonstrating that the technology was ready to move beyond the research lab. They also invented the highly efficient crossbar-based computing paradigm for matrix-vector multiplication acceleration, laying the technical foundation for a broad class of modern nonvolatile memory-based AI accelerators.
Their research partnership continued into academia at the University of Pittsburgh before they established the joint Center for Computational Evolutionary Intelligence lab at Duke.
Chen studies emerging memory systems, neuromorphic hardware and energy-efficient edge AI architecture, and he leads the National Science Foundation’s AI Institute for Edge Computing Leveraging Next Generation Networks (Athena). Li conducts research on next-generation computer architectures, specialized accelerators, hardware-software co-design and memory-centric systems for intelligent computing. Together, their labs help move ideas from devices and circuits into practical AI systems that can operate closer to where data is generated.
With these honors, both researchers have now earned technical achievement and impact awards from all three major Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) groups in their discipline: the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS), the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA).
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