Prof. XIE Yuan Won 2026 ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation

Prof. Xie Yuan (fourth left) and his former PhD students and collaborators received the prestigious 2026 ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation at the 63rd Design Automation Conference, held in Long Beach, California, in July 2026. [Download Photo]

Fang Professor of Engineering Prof. XIE Yuan, Chair Professor of the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and his co-authors received the prestigious 2026 ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation during the opening ceremony of the 63rd Design Automation Conference (DAC), held on July 26-29, 2026, in Long Beach, California. As one of the highest honors in the electronic design automation (EDA) field, the award recognizes Prof. Xie’s foundational work on magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) and 3D-integrated memory architectures.

Presented annually by the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation and the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA), the award honors an outstanding technical contribution demonstrated by a paper published at least 10 years earlier. It recognizes seminal work in which an original idea was first introduced. Selection is based primarily on the impact of the work on technology, industry, education, and practicing designers and engineers in the EDA field.

The 2026 award recognizes the lasting impact of the team’s seminal paper, titled “Circuit and Microarchitecture Evaluation of 3D Stacking Magnetic RAM (MRAM) as a Universal Memory Replacement”, presented at the 45th DAC in 2008. The work demonstrated that MRAM, combined with 3D stacking architectures, could serve as a viable universal memory technology. That finding helped launch a global industry now valued in the billions of dollars.

Prof. Xie shares the award with his former doctoral students at the Pennsylvania State University – Dr. DONG Xiangyu, Dr. WU Xiaoxia, and Dr. SUN Guangyu, as well as longtime collaborators Prof. LI Hai and Prof. CHEN Yiran of Duke University.

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