Yu-Tung Liu

Research:
I am a first-year PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park, under the supervision of Prof. Cunxi Yu. My research focuses on building autonomous AI agents for chip design automation — leveraging LLMs to drive the full ASIC flow (RTL generation, synthesis, physical design) with human-in-the-loop oversight. Previously, I developed neural methods for IR drop estimation at NYCU (1st place, ICCAD 2023 CAD Contest) and applied diffusion and state-space models to biomedical signal denoising at Academia Sinica.

Education: I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), previously known as National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), where I worked with Prof. Hung-Ming Chen and Prof. Juinn-Dar Huang. I was a research intern at Academia Sinica, where I worked on efficient learning algorithms for biomedical signal processing with Dr. Yu Tsao.

news

Mar 11, 2026	I will be presnting a poster at NSF Workshop on Agents for Chip Design Automation!
Feb 23, 2026	TOPCELL is accepted to DAC 2026. Congrats to Zhan Song and the team!
Apr 11, 2025	With great honor, I served as a session chair at the ICASSP 2025!
Jan 14, 2025	Our collaborative work with Prof. C.-C. Jay Kuo’s group from USC was accepted by TCAD!

selected publications

(*) denotes equal contribution

DAC

TOPCELL: Topology Optimization of Standard Cell via LLMs

Zhan Song, Yu-Tung Liu, Chen Chen, and 6 more authors

In 2026 62nd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2026
ICCAD

CFIRSTNET: Comprehensive Features for Static IR Drop Estimation with Neural Network

Yu-Tung Liu^*, Yu-Hao Cheng^*, Shao-Yu Wu, and 1 more author

In IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), 2024, 2024

Abs PDF Slides

IR drop estimation is now considered a first-order metric due to the concern about reliability and performance in modern electronic products. Since traditional solution involves lengthy iteration and simulation flow, how to achieve fast yet accurate estimation has become an essential demand. In this work, with the help of modern AI acceleration techniques, we propose a comprehensive solution to combine both the advantages of image-based and netlist-based features in neural network framework and obtain high-quality IR drop prediction very effectively in modern designs. A customized convolutional neural network (CNN) is developed to extract PDN features and make static IR drop estimations. Trained and evaluated with the open-source dataset, experiment results show that we have obtained the best quality in the benchmark on the problem of IR drop estimation in ICCAD CAD Contest 2023, proving the effectiveness of this important design topic.
TCAD

GIRD: A Green IR-Drop Estimation Method

Chee-An Yu, Yu-Tung Liu, Yu-Hao Cheng, and 3 more authors

IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 2025

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An energy-efficient high-performance static IR-drop estimation method based on green learning called GIRD (Green IR Drop) is proposed in this work. GIRD processes the IC design input in three steps. First, the input netlist data are converted to multi-channel maps. Their joint spatial-spectral representations are determined with PixelHop. Next, discriminant features are selected using the relevant feature test (RFT). Finally, the selected features are fed to the XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting trees) regressor. Both PixelHop and RFT are green learning tools. GIRD yields a low carbon footprint due to its smaller model sizes and lower computational complexity. Besides, its performance scales well with small training datasets. Experiments on synthetic and real circuits are given to demonstrate the superior performance of GIRD. The model size and the complexity, measured by the Floating Point Operations (FLOPs), of GIRD are only 10-3 and 10-2 of deep-learning methods, respectively.