Wuxi Li

Principal Software Engineer

AMD/Xilinx

About me

I am a Principal Software Engineer in the Vivado Implementation Team at AMD/Xilinx. Prior to joining Xilinx, I received my Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2019, supervised by Prof. David Z. Pan in the UTDA Laboratory. I received my B.S. degree in Microelectronics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2013.

I do research in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). I like developing tools to increase the productivity of circuit designers, improve the quality of modern VLSI systems, and overcome chip design challenges. My Ph.D. dissertation was on Placement Algorithms for Large-Scale Heterogeneous FPGAs.

I have received the Best Paper Award at DAC 2019, the Silver Medal in ACM Student Research Contest at ICCAD 2018, and the 1st-place awards in the FPGA placement contests of ISPD 2016 and 2017. I have interned at Xilinx, Cadence, Apple, and ARM.

News

²⁄₂₀₂₀ : My co-authored paper, FLOPS: Efficient On-Chip Learning for Optical Neural Networks Through Stochastic Zeroth-Order Optimization, is accepted by DAC’20.
¹⁄₂₀₂₀ : My co-authored paper, ABCDPlace: Accelerated Batch-based Concurrent Detailed Placement on Multi-threaded CPUs and GPUs, is accepted by TCAD.
⁸⁄₂₀₁₉ : My co-authored paper, High-Definition Routing Congestion Prediction for Large-Scale FPGAs, is accepted by ASPDAC’20.
⁸⁄₂₀₁₉ : My co-authored paper, S3DET: Detecting System Symmetry Constraints for Analog Circuits with Graph Similarity, is accepted by ASPDAC’20.
⁶⁄₂₀₁₉ : Our paper, elfPlace: Electrostatics-based Placement for Large-Scale Heterogeneous FPGAs, is accepted by ICCAD’19.
⁶⁄₂₀₁₉ : My co-authored paper, DREAMPlace: Deep Learning Toolkit-Enabled GPU Acceleration for Modern VLSI Placement, received the Best Paper Award at DAC’19.
²⁄₂₀₁₉ : My co-authored paper, DREAMPlace: Deep Learning Toolkit-Enabled GPU Acceleration for Modern VLSI Placement, is accepted by DAC’19.
¹¹⁄₂₀₁₈ : Our paper, Simultaneous Placement and Clock Tree Construction for Modern FPGAs, is accepted by FPGA’19.
¹¹⁄₂₀₁₈ : I won the Silver Medal at ACM/SIGDA Student Research Competition held at the ICCAD 2018.
⁸⁄₂₀₁₈ : I received the George J. Heuer, Jr. Ph.D. Endowed Graduate Fellowship Fund from the Cockrell School of Engineering, UT-Austin.
⁸⁄₂₀₁₈ : I finished my internship at Xilinx and received the 3rd-Place Award of the intern showcase presentation.
⁷⁄₂₀₁₈ : Our journal paper, A New Paradigm for FPGA Placement without Explicit Packing, is accepted by TCAD.
⁶⁄₂₀₁₈ : My co-authored journal paper, A Practical Split Manufacturing Framework for Trojan Prevention via Simultaneous Wire Lifting and Cell Insertion, is accepted by TCAD.
¹²⁄₂₀₁₇ : Our journal paper, UTPlaceF 2.0: A High-Performance Clock-Aware FPGA Placement Engine, is accepted by TODAES.

Journal Articles

[J10] Donghao Fang, Boyang Zhang, Hailiang Hu, Wuxi Li, Bo Yuan, Jiang Hu. Global Placement Exploiting Soft 2D Regularity. ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), 2025.

[J9] Licheng Guo, Pongstorn Maidee, Yun Zhou, Chris Lavin, Eddie Hung, Wuxi Li, Jason Lau, Weikang Qiao, Yuze Chi, Linghao Song, Yuanlong Xiao, Alireza Kaviani, Zhiru Zhang, Jason Cong. RapidStream 2.0: Automated Parallel Implementation of Latency Insensitive FPGA Designs Through Partial Reconfiguration. ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS), 2023.

[J8] Yibai Meng, Wuxi Li, Yibo Lin, David Z. Pan. elfPlace: Electrostatics-based Placement for Large-Scale Heterogeneous FPGAs. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), 2021.

[J7] Yibo Lin, Zixuan Jiang, Jiaqi Gu, Wuxi Li, Shounak Dhar, Haoxing Ren, Brucek Khailany, David Z. Pan. DREAMPlace: Deep Learning Toolkit-Enabled GPU Acceleration for Modern VLSI Placement. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), 2020. (Best Paper Award)

[J6] Yibo Lin, Wuxi Li, Jiaqi Gu, Haoxing Ren, Brucek Khailany, David Z. Pan. ABCDPlace: Accelerated Batch-based Concurrent Detailed Placement on Multi-threaded CPUs and GPUs. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), 2020.

[J5] Wuxi Li, David Z. Pan. A New Paradigm for FPGA Placement without Explicit Packing. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), 2018.

PDF

[J4] Meng Li, Bei Yu, Yibo Lin, Xiaoqing Xu, Wuxi Li, David Z. Pan. A Practical Split Manufacturing Framework for Trojan Prevention via Simultaneous Wire Lifting and Cell Insertion. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), 2018.

[J3] Wuxi Li, Yibo Lin, Meng Li, Shounak Dhar, David Z. Pan. UTPlaceF 2.0: A High-Performance Clock-Aware FPGA Placement Engine. ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), 2018. (1st-Place Award of ISPD 2017 Contest)

PDF

[J2] Wuxi Li, Shounak Dhar, David Z. Pan. UTPlaceF: A Routability-Driven FPGA Placer with Physical and Congestion Aware Packing. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), 2017.

PDF Software

[J1] Wuxi Li, Hang Yuan, Wei Xu, Kunling Geng, Guoxing Wang. An Optimization Procedure for Coil Design in a Dual Band Wireless Power and Data Transmission System. ECS Transactions (ECST), 2013.

PDF

Conference Papers

More Publications

[C18] Zizheng Guo, Zuodong Zhang, Wuxi Li, Tsung-Wei Huang, Xizhe Shi, Yufan Du, Yibo Lin, Runsheng Wang, Ru Huang. HeteroExcept: A CPU-GPU Heterogeneous Algorithm to Accelerate Exception-aware Static Timing Analysis. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), 2024.

[C17] Donghao Fang, Hailaing Hu, Wuxi Li, Bo Yuan, Jiang Hu. SysMix: Mixed-Size Placement for Systolic-Array-Based Hierarchical Designs. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), 2024.

[C16] Wuxi Li, Yuji Kukimoto, Gregory Servel, Ismail Bustany, Mehrdad E. Dehkordi. Calibration-Based Differentiable Timing Optimization in Non-linear Global Placement. ACM International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), 2024.

[C15] Hailiang Hu, Donghao Fang, Wuxi Li, Bo Yuan, Jiang Hu. Systolic Array Placement on FPGAs. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), 2023.

[C14] Ismail Bustany, Grigor Gasparyan, Amit Gupta, Andrew B. Kahng, Meghraj Kalase, Wuxi Li, Bodhisatta Pramanik. The 2023 MLCAD FPGA Macro Placement Benchmark Design Suite and Contest Results. ACM/IEEE Workshop on Machine Learning for CAD (MLCAD), 2023.

[C13] Zizheng Guo, Zuodong Zhang, Xun Jiang, Wuxi Li, Yibo Lin, Runsheng Wang, Ru Huang. General-Purpose Gate-Level Simulation with Partition-Agnostic Parallelism. ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2023.

[C12] Donghao Fang, Boyang Zhang, Hailiang Hu, Wuxi Li, Bo Yuan, Jiang Hu. Global Placement Exploiting Soft 2D Regularity. ACM International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), 2022.

[C11] Jiaqi Gu, Zheng Zhao, Chenghao Feng, Wuxi Li, Ray T. Chen, David Z. Pan. FLOPS: Efficient On-Chip Learning for Optical Neural Networks Through Stochastic Zeroth-Order Optimization. ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2020.

[C10] Mohamed B. Alawieh, Wuxi Li, Yibo Lin, Love Singhal, Mahesh Iyer, David Z. Pan. High-Definition Routing Congestion Prediction for Large-Scale FPGAs. IEEE/ACM Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASPDAC), 2020.

[C9] Mingjie Liu, Wuxi Li, Keren Zhu, Biying Xu, Yibo Lin, Linxiao Shen, Xiyuan Tang, Nan Sun, David Z. Pan. S3DET: Detecting System Symmetry Constraints for Analog Circuits with Graph Similarity. IEEE/ACM Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASPDAC), 2020.