How a Peking University Student Dominated Global EDA Competitions and Won ACM’s Top Student Award

Guo Zizheng, a senior student of Peking University Turing Class, recently won first place in the ACM Student Research Competition (undergraduate group) and received praise from the People's Daily.

He has previously earned the ASC first prize in the World University Supercomputing Competition and published eight first‑author papers in top EDA conferences such as DAC, ICCAD, and TCAD.

Guo’s research focuses on static timing analysis in EDA, proposing GPU‑accelerated algorithms that achieve linear time‑space complexity and a hundred‑fold speedup, as well as integrating graph neural networks with timing engines for cross‑stage chip design modeling.

His work also includes a differentiable timing engine for layout optimization, yielding up to 32.7% improvement in WNS and 59.1% in TNS, with a 1.80× speedup on GPU.

For these achievements, he was awarded the 13th Student May Fourth Medal at Peking University and will continue his PhD studies in the School of Integrated Circuits.

First‑Author Publications in Top Conferences

The Turing Class selects outstanding students from thousands of freshmen; Guo joined a research group led by Prof. Lin Yibo, focusing on EDA and GPU/FPGA acceleration.

His paper "Heterogeneous Timing Estimation, Optimization, and Verification for VLSI Circuit Design Automation" was accepted at ICCAD 2021.

Five of Six Winners Are Chinese

Among the six global SRC finalists, four other winners are also of Chinese origin, including Lai Ziliang (blockchain), Haotiang Zhang (MIPS), Zhang Yihong (programming languages and databases), and Chen Yang (code‑representation learning).

“My algorithm competition experience helped a lot, and the hands‑on process went smoothly.” – Guo Zizheng

Guo also participated in informatics competitions during high school, which helped his admission to Peking University.

He and his teammates have won numerous awards such as the 2019 ICPC regional championship, ASC first prize, and multiple gold medals in programming contests.