Overview
This project is part of a 4 year Dual PhD degree programme between the National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Taiwan and the University of Liverpool in England. As Part of the NTHU-UoL Dual PhD Award students are in the unique position of being able to gain 2 PhD awards at the end of their degree from two internationally recognised world leading Universities. As well as benefiting from a rich cultural experience, Students can draw on large scale national facilities of both countries and create a worldwide network of contacts across 2 continents.
About this opportunity
Modern industry and infrastructure rely on vast amounts of embedded digital hardware, from data centres and communication networks to smart grids and transportation systems. The design of these complex systems is only feasible with sophisticated electronic design automation (EDA) tools.
Traditionally, EDA has prioritised fast runtimes to keep pace with transistor scaling and to support rapid design space exploration, even though many underlying problems are computationally hard. With the rise of custom processors and accelerators for AI and machine learning, this balance is shifting: architectures are often highly regular, but individual processing units contain complex arithmetic and control blocks. For these critical components, it is now worthwhile to invest more computational effort in order to obtain higher-quality implementations.
This project develops logic synthesis techniques for generating digital circuits that are provably optimal with respect to design metrics such as area, power, or depth. Instead of relying solely on heuristic optimisation, we encode the search for optimal implementations as SAT or QBF problems and use advanced solvers to systematically explore the design space.
Working jointly between National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) and the University of Liverpool (UoL), the student will design scalable encodings for logic synthesis, adapt and extend automated reasoning algorithms to this setting, incorporate technology constraints from standard-cell libraries and timing considerations, and implement and evaluate a prototype tool on circuits representative of industrial designs. The project provides integrated training in logic synthesis, EDA and automated reasoning, combining cutting-edge tool development with fundamental research.
This PhD is delivered through the dual NTHU–University of Liverpool programme. The first two years will be spent at NTHU (Dr Chun-Yao Wang) and the following two years at the University of Liverpool (Dr Friedrich Slivovsky), or vice versa. For the successful student, this combination offers a unique and high-quality training environment: they will learn to work at the interface of advanced EDA and state-of-the-art automated reasoning, gaining skills that are highly relevant to both academia and the semiconductor and design-automation industries. The dual-institution setup ensures that the research is simultaneously grounded in realistic industrial requirements and informed by the latest developments in logic-based methods and solver technology.
There are also opportunities of internship in leading semiconductor, IC design, and EDA companies in Taiwan like TSMC, Cadence, Synopsys, MediaTek and others.