Assistant Professor
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)

Zhiyao Xie is an Assistant Professor in the ECE Department at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), where he joined in 2022 Fall. His research focuses on AI-assisted electronic design automation (EDA) and chip design methodologies. He completed his Ph.D. at Duke University in 2022 under the supervision of Prof. Yiran Chen and Prof. Hai (Helen) Li, following his B.Eng from CityU HK in 2017 with a full scholarship & first-class honours. During his Ph.D. studies, Zhiyao also worked as a research intern at leading IC and EDA companies, including NVIDIA, Arm, Cadence, and Synopsys, where he was fortunate to work with Dr. Haoxing Ren, Dr. Brucek Khailany, Dr. Xiaoqing Xu, Dr. Shidhartha Das, and Prof. Jiang Hu.

Zhiyao has received multiple prestigious awards, including the RGC HK Early Career Award 2023 (7 out of 525), ACM Outstanding Dissertation Award in EDA 2023 (1 awardee per year), EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award 2023 (4 awardees per year), MICRO 2021 Best Paper Award (1st-author, 1 out of 430), ASP-DAC 2023 Best Paper Award (2 out of 328), WAIC Yufan Award (Brilliant Star) 2023, ACM SIGDA SRF 2022 Best Research Poster Award, and 4 more best paper nominations. He also received Faculty Teaching Excellence Appreciation Award 2023/24 for his computer architecture course. He has published 50+ referred papers, more than half in top EDA venues (DAC, ICCAD, IEEE TCAD) and some others in top computer architecture venues (MICRO, ISCA, HPCA).

He served as the conference TPC Member/TPC Track Chair/Student Forum Chair of DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASPDAC, MLCAD, LAD, ISEDA, GLSVLSI; the journal reviewer of IEEE TCAD, ACM TODAES (Distinguished Reviewer), IEEE TCAS-I, IEEE TVLSI, IEEE ESL, IEEE Design & Test, IEEE CAL, IEEE SPL, ACM JETC, ACM TECS, Springer JCST; and as the Finance Chair of IEEE CEDA Hong Kong.

Selected Award & Honors

• ASP-DAC 2025 Best Paper Nomination, 2025 (13 out of 537)
• Faculty Teaching Excellence Appreciation Award, ECE Department, 2023/24
• ACM/IEEE ISLPED 2024 Best Paper Nomination, 2024 (8 out of 167)
• IEEE LAD 2024 Best Paper Nomination, 2024 (6 out of 80)
• RGC HK Early Career Award, 2023 (7 out of 525 early-career faculties)
• WAIC Yufan ‘‘Brilliant Star’’ Award, 2023 (Top 10 AI researchers under age of 35)
• ACM Outstanding Dissertation Award in EDA, 2023 (1 awardee worldwide per year)
• EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award, 2023 (4 awardees worldwide per year)
• ASP-DAC 2023 Best Paper Award, 2023 (2 out of 328)
• ASP-DAC 2023 Best Paper Nomination, 2023 (11 out of 328)
• ACM TODAES Distinguished Reviewer, 2022
• ACM SIGDA SRF Best Research Poster Award, 2022
• IEEE/ACM MICRO 2021 Best Paper Award, 2021 (1 out of 430)
• ECE Ph.D. Fellowship, Duke University, 2018
• Dean’s List for all 8 UG Semesters, CityU HK, 2013-2017
• Outstanding Student Prize, CityU HK, 2016
• Full Scholarship for Mainland Undergraduates, CityU HK, 2013-2017

Selected Government Research Grants

• PC, “Intelligent and Agile Integrated Circuit Design Methodologies Based on Circuit Foundation Models,” Research Grants Council (RGC) Collaborative Research Fund (CRF) YCRG, 06/2025 – 05/2028, HK$ 3,537,000.
• PI, “Register-Transfer Level Early Timing Prediction and Optimization by Machine Learning in Electronic Design Automation,” Research Grants Council (RGC) General Research Fund (GRF), 01/2025 – 12/2027, HK$ 1,121,111.
• PI, “Reliable Machine Learning Techniques for Electronic Design Automation: Understanding Circuit Layouts from Data Perspective,” Research Grants Council (RGC) Early Career Scheme (ECS), 09/2023 – 08/2026, HK$ 1,156,155.
  (RGC Early Career Award 2023, only 7 awardees in HK)
• PI, “Early-Design-Stage Power Estimation and Runtime On-Chip Power Monitoring for VLSI Design,” National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Young Scientists Fund (YSF), 01/2024 – 12/2026, HK$ 339,570.

Selected Research Directions

Our Vision: Explore ground-breaking AI/EDA methods to deliver better VLSI circuit design with lower NRE cost, less human effort, and shorter turnaround time.

• Foundation AI Model for Circuit Design
  • A Comprehensive Survey of Circuit Foundation Model in 2025: Survey-CFM
  • LLM-Aided Circuit Design Generation:
        RTLCoder TCAD’25, OpenLLM-RTL ICCAD’24,
        RTLLM ASPDAC’24 (100+ citations, a widely-adopted benchmark)
  • General Circuit Encoder:
        CircuitFusion ICLR’25, NetTAG DAC’25, CircuitEncoder ASPDAC’25
  • Synthetic Circuit Data Generation:
        SynCircuit DAC’25, CircuitGen ASPDAC’25
• AI-Assisted Pre-Layout Circuit Modeling
  • Arch-Stage Power Modeling:
        PANDA ICCAD’23 TCAD’25, AutoPower DAC’25
  • RTL-Stage and On-Chip Power Modeling:
        APOLLO MICRO’21 (Best Paper Award), DEEP ICCAD’22,
        AgileDev ISLPED’24 (Best Paper Nomination), PROPHET DAC’23 TCAD’24
  • RTL-Stage Timing Modeling:
        MasterRTL ICCAD’23 TCAD’25, RTL-Timer DAC’24
  • Netlist-Stage Timing and Power Modeling:
        Net$^2$ TCAD’22, ATLAS DAC’25, SMART-GPO ASPDAC’25 (Best Paper Nomination)
• AI-Assisted Post-Layout Circuit Modeling
  • Routabitliy and IR Drop Modeling:
        RouteNet ICCAD’18 (200+ citations), AutoDRC ICCAD’21 TCAD’24,
        PowerNet ASPDAC’20 ICCAD’20 (100+ citations)
  • Reliablity and Security of AI-assisted Chip Design:
        DarkSide TCAD’22, Robustify ICCAD’22, APPLE ASPDAC’24,
        Security ASPDAC’23 (Best Paper Award), FLNet DAC’22
• CPU Prefetcher Design
             Alecto HPCA’25, Prophet ISCA’25

    Please check my full publications list here

Meet Some of My Students

• Qijun Zhang (Enrolled in 23’Fall) Qijun-site
• Yao Lu (Enrolled in 23’Fall) Yao-site
• Shang Liu (Enrolled in 23’Fall) Shang-site
• Wenji Fang (Enrolled in 24’Fall) Wenji-site
• Wenkai Li (Enrolled in 24’Fall) Wenkai-site
• Mengming Li (Enrolled in 24’Fall) Mengming-site

    The full list of our excellent group members is here

Ph.D. Student Recruitment

• I am looking for motivated students to join my lab as Ph.D. students in HKUST!
  • We welcome students with both CS and EE background.
  • We only take students that meet at least one of following criteria: 1) strong algorithm and programming background; 2) strong deep learning background; 3) strong computer architecture background; 4) rich research experience with publications.
  • Learn more about ML for EDA in Chinese.
  • We support RA or Master only if you intend to continue with a PhD in our team.
• Do not hesitate to email me (eezhiyao@ust.hk) if you are interested!
  • Please do excuse me for not being able to reply every email… Also please do not be discouraged if you do not receive a reply.
  • No need to waste time writing a long email, just drop me your CV with grade.

Why Joining Us?

• Our research topics are highly cross-disciplinary. You are expected to master deep knowledge on programming, data structure and algorithm, machine learning, EDA, VLSI design, etc. after you graduate. I believe many of these directions are in a very high demand in job market nowadays.

• HKUST is undoubtedly a top Asian university in science and engineering. Its world ranking was #34 in QS 2022, and #24 in QS 2022 Engineering & Technology.