Jason Cong

Jason Cong holds the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at UCLA's Samueli School of Engineering. With over 500 publications and leadership in 100+ research projects, he revolutionized FPGA design through polynomial-time logic mapping and High-Level Synthesis (HLS). His lab's AutoESL technology became the foundation of AMD/Xilinx's commercial tools.

Education

• Peking University: Undergraduate Degree
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: MS in Computer Science
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: PhD in Computer Science

Research Focus

Cong pioneers domain-specific acceleration across deep learning, medical imaging, genomic sequencing, and data compression. His customizable computing architectures demonstrate orders-of-magnitude energy efficiency improvements over conventional CPUs. Quantum computing and scalable algorithm design constitute emerging research vectors.

Honors and Impact

• ACM Breakthrough Award (2025) for FPGA automation
• IEEE Noyce Medal for semiconductor contributions
• Dual Fellow: ACM & IEEE
• National Academy of Engineering member
• Newton Award for EDA technical impact

Commercialization

Founded Aplus Design Automation (FPGA algorithms) and AutoESL (acquired by Xilinx/AMD). Current tools power industry-standard FPGA synthesis workflows enabling C/C++ programmability.