In the spirit of the long-running ACM programming contest, the CADathlon challenges students in their CAD knowledge, and their problem solving, programming, and teamwork skills. It serves as an innovative initiative to assist in the development of top students in the EDA field. The contest will provide a platform for SIGDA, academia, and industry to focus attention on the best and brightest of next generation CAD professionals.

The students will be given a number of problems that range in difficulty and topics. Information about the CAD areas, relevant papers, and potentially a software framework that will run on Linux will be released one week before the competition. Students will be allowed to work in teams of two. At the contest, students will be given the problem statements and an example test data, but they will not have the judges' test data. Solutions will be judged on correctness and efficiency. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time is declared the winner. Incorrect solutions will be penalized. A handsome prize awaits the winning team. The judges are experts in EDA from both academia and industry.

During the competition students will be presented with six problems in the following areas:

• Circuit Design & Analysis
• Physical Design
• Logic & High-Level Synthesis
• System Design & Analysis
• Functional Verification
• Timing, Test, and Manufacturing

The competition is open to all graduate students specializing in CAD currently enrolled full-time in a Ph.D. granting institution in any country. Partial or full travel grants will be provided for qualifying students.

This project is sponsored by SIGDA, with generous contributions from Altera, Cadence, IBM, Magma and Mentor Graphics.