About

Cunxi is an Assistant Professor in the ECE Department (A. James Clark School of Engineering), and an affiliated Assistant Professor in the CS Department, at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests focus on novel algorithms, systems, and hardware designs for computing and security. Before joining the University of Maryland, Cunxi was an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, and held postdoctoral appointments at Cornell University (with Prof. Zhiru Zhang) and EPFL in 2017-2018 (with Prof. Giovanni De Micheli). Cunxi was a research intern at IBM T.J Watson Research Center in 2015 and 2016. He received Ph.D. degree from UMass Amherst in 2017 under Prof. Maciej Ciesielski. His work has received the Best Paper Award at ASPLOS (2025), Best Paper Award at DAC (2023), Best Paper Finalist at DAC (2025), Best Paper Nomination at ICCAD (2025), and several other Best Paper Nominations, NVIDIA Academic Research Award (2025), First Place at DAC Hack@DAC (2017), American Physical Society DLS poster award (2022), and NSF CAREER Award (2021). CV (2 pages)

I am very fortunate to work with a group of talented researchers and students! I am actively seeking students who show strong interests in EDA and formal methods research.

I am deeply grateful to my wife and our two beloved cats, Bagel and Oreo, for their unwavering support and companionship.

Recent talks

• The Rise and Fall of Machine Learning for EDA and Combinatorial Optimization and Verification (U Delaware, Peking U, Google X, NVIDIA, Synopsys, UWisconsin Madison, GaTech, TAMU, Google DeepMind, University of Minnesota, UCLA)
• A Computer Engineering Journey to Optical Neural Networks: Infrastructure, Algorithms, and Co-design (Rutgers Efficient AI Seminar, Stevens Institute of Technology, NCSU, OPTSys Seminar Series)

News

• 07/2026 Three papers accepted at ICCAD'26.
• 07/2026 Three papers accepted at MLCAD 2026.
• 06/2026 Join DARPA ML2P program as Lead PI of Team UMD ($1.8 million).
• 05/2026 VeriTrace accepted to ICLAD'26 as a long oral.
• 05/2026 Carsten received ECE Outstanding Academic Performance Award!
• 04/2026 Awarded NSF/DOE CS2 Grant.
• 03/2026 Two patents filed.
• 02/2026 Three papers accepted at DAC'26.
• 02/2026 Summer internships: Zhan, Curie -> NVIDIA Research; Mingju -> Cadence
• 01/2026 FVRuleLearner accepted at IEEE VTS 2026.
• 01/2026 Jiaqi has successfully defended! Congrats Dr. Yin.
• 12/2025 ReVEAL accepted at TACAS. Congrats Chen!
• 10/2025 Invited talk at UCLA CS.
• 09/2025 e-boost received Best Paper Nomination at ICCAD'25.
• 09/2025 Repository-scale Code Self-Evolution SATLUTION on arXiv.
• 09/2025 Colloquium at University of Minnesota
• 08/2025 Invited talk at Google DeepMind
• 07/2025 Three papers accepted at MLCAD 2025.
• 07/2025 Three papers accepted at ICCAD 2025.
• 06/2025 Yu received NVIDIA Academic Research Award.
• 05/2025 REVEAL accepted at IWLS 2025.
• 05/2025 BoolE has received Best Paper Finalist (5/1862) at DAC 2025! GitHub
• 05/2025 One paper accepted at Nature Communications.
• 05/2025 One paper accepted at ICML'25.
• 05/2025 HEC accepted at USENIX ATC'25.
• 04/2025 SmoothE received Best Paper Award at ASPLOS'25!
GitHub
• (past news)

Open-source Tools

Formal Verification & Synthesis via E-Graphs

• eBoost (ICCAD'25, Best Paper Nomination). [GitHub]
• BoolE (DAC'25, Best Paper Nomination) BoolE: Exact Symbolic Reasoning via Boolean Equality Saturation. [GitHub]
• SmoothE (ASPLOS'25, Best Paper Award) (Differentiable E-Graph Extraction) [GitHub]
• E-morphic (DAC'25) (Scalable Equality Saturation for Structural Exploration in Logic Synthesis) [GitHub]

ML-based Synthesis & Design Automation Systems

• MapTune (ICCAD'24) Boosting ASIC Mapping with standard-cell library tuning - [GitHub]
• Gamora (DAC'23, Best Paper Award) (Graph learning for Boolean reasoning) [GitHub]
• FlowTune (ICCAD'20, TCAD'22) (with end-to-end FPGA/ASIC support) [GitHub]
• FlowGen (DAC'18) [GitHub] (replaced by FlowTune)

Photonic & Optical Neural Network Design

• LightRidge (ICCAD'24, ASPLOS'24, Nature Communications'25) (An End-to-end Agile Design Framework for Diffractive Optical Neural Networks) [LightRidge]

Formal Verification Systems

• Algebraic Combinational Equivalence Checking (ACEC) [Thesis Version] [New Version] [ACEC@ABC]
• Logic Decryption using Incremental SAT [Website] [GitHub]
• Formal Verification of GF(2^n) Arithmetic (ASP-DAC'17, Best Paper Nomination) [Website] [GitHub]

 

People

PhD Students: Mingju Liu (ECE, Fall'22 - ), Curie Kim (CS, Sp'24), Zhan Song (ECE, Fall'24), Qihao Hu (ECE, Fall'25 -), Yu-Tung Liu (Fall'25 - )

Undergrad: Carsten Portner (NSF REU; S'24 - )

Alumni:

• Dr. Jiaqi Yin (Utah/UMD, 20-25) -> Apple
• Dr. Yingjie Li (Utah/UMD, 20-25) -> Simon Fraser University
• Qihao Hu -> PhD Program, UMD
• Dr. Walter Lau Neto (Utah, 19-22) -> Synopsys
• Dr. Yingheng Tang (visiting student) -> Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Tara Zamani (Utah, 19-21) -> Duke
• Daniel Robinson (Utah, 22-24; NSF REU) -> PhD Program, MIT EECS

 

Professional Service

Organizing Committee: ASAP'19, ICCD'21-23, VLSI-SoC'20, General Chair@IWLS'23, MLCAD'23-25

TPC Member: IWLS*7, ICCAD*7, DAC*6, DATE*5, ASP-DAC*4, ICCD*2

Session Chair: DAC*5, ICCAD*2

Journal Review

• Science Advances
• Nature Communications
• Nature Machine Intelligence
• Nature Scientific Reports
• Nature Light: Science & Applications
• Nanophotonics
• ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
• IEEE Design & Test of Computers
• IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems
• IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
• IEEE Transactions on Computers
• IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
• IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems
• IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing
• IEEE Computer Architecture Letters
• ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems

Sponsors