WISCAD -- Wisconsin Computer-Aided Design Group University of Wisconsin - Madison

Current Members

member portrait Azadeh Davoodi Principal Investigator
member portrait Navid Nader Tehrani PhD Student
member portrait Advait Paithankar MS Student
member portrait Saba Maddahali Undergraduate Student

WISCAD Graduates : PhD

Lizi Zhang, PhD’26

Robert Viramontes, PhD’25

Maedeh Hemmat, PhD’21

Wei Zeng, PhD’21

Boyu Zhang, PhD’19

Jonathon Magaña, PhD’19

Daohang Shi, PhD’16

Daniel Seemuth, PhD’16

Min Li, PhD’14

Hamid Shojaei, PhD’12

Tai-Hsuan Wu, PhD’11

Lin Xie, PhD’10

WISCAD Graduates : MS

Haowei Ge, Professional MS student, Fall 2025, research topic: data poisoning

Edward Tashjian, Fall 2015, DAC Publication: “Using control signals to improve reverse engineering words in a bit-level circuit”, ARM

Sakshi Gupta, Spring 2015, Intel

Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Spring 2014, GLSVLSI Publication: “Online and operand-aware detection of failures by utilizing false alarm vectors”, PhD at Georgia Tech

Shirley Lei, Fall 2013, Project: “Routability-driven standard-cell design for 3D monolithic ICs”

Yao Ding, Fall 2013, Project: “Routability-driven partitioning in 3D monolithic ICs”

Ranjan Banerjee, MS student, Fall 2012 and Spring 2013, Topic: “Routing congestion”, Oracle

Vandita Gupta, MS student, Summar and Fall 2012, Topic: “Secure IC placement”, Intel

Ziliang Guo, Fall 2011, Topic: “Parallel global routing”

Meng Shi, 2010, Marvell

Shreyas Parnerkas, 2010, Project: “False-path aware static timing analysis”, AMD

Anuj Kumar, 2009, ICCD Publication/Thesis: “SynECO: Technology remapping with incremental constrained placement and exact timing estimation”, Cisco, and later senior R&D engineer at Synopsys

Jungseob Lee, 2007, ISCAS Publication/Thesis: “Design of a robust low-leakage SRAM under process variations”, PhD student at UW-Madison, Intel

Past Undergraduate Researchers at WISCAD :

Jayden Lee, Undergraduate researcher working on data poisoning attack, presented work at ECE Undergraduate Research Symposium, April 2026

Han Lyu, Undergraduate researcher working on hardware Trojan detection on gate-level netlist based on the ICCAD 2025 contest, Summer 2025

Jackson Melchert, Summer and Fall 2017, and Spring 2018 REU, Publication: “Local net modeling with machine learning”, TVLSI’17, GLSVLSI’18, PhD student at Stanford

David Yu, Summer and Fall 2016 REU, Project: “Synthesis with majority logic”

Edward Tashjian, Fall 2013 NSF REU, Publication: “Use of control signals for reverse-engineering gate-level netlists”, news article

Kenneth Siu, Fall 2013 REU, Project: “Hacking design information from an encrypted netlist at the placement level”

Hao Liang, BS student, Fall 2012, Topic: “Evaluation of a software package using Unix shell scripting and Perl programming”

Ye Hu, Spring and Summer REU 2011, Project: “Routability-driven Placement”, Qualcomm

Ammar Al Marzouqi, Summer 2011, Project: “Routing in Structured ASIC”

Michael Anderson, Spring and Summer REU 2009, Project/Publication: “Statistical timing analysis”, “Parallel timing optimization”, PhD student at Berkeley

Ahmed Fikri, Spring 2011, Project: “Physically Unclonable Functions for IC security”

Zhilong Cong, Fall 2010, Project: “Physically Unclonable Functions for IC security”