Texas ECE Ph.D. student Souradip Poddar has won the inaugural IEEE International Conference on LLM-Aided Design (LAD) Fellowship. The fellowship recognizes outstanding academic achievements, research excellence, and the exciting promise of the proposed work.

The 2026 IEEE International Conference on LLM-Aided Design will focus on how to use LLM (Large Language Model) technology to help design circuits, software, and computing systems with improved quality, productivity, robustness, and cost. It is the first international conference dedicated to this topic, aiming to showcase results that leverage generative-AI advances and provide new methods and solutions for design automation, software development, and other fields. The conference will host leading researchers, present open-source LLM models, datasets, tool flows, and offer benchmarking, testing, and validation methods.

Souradip received his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT Kharagpur), India in 2019. He joined Texas ECE in Fall 2022, and is currently a Ph.D. student supervised by David Z. Pan at the UT Design Automation (UTDA) Lab. His research primarily focuses on developing machine learning-driven, designer-aligned automation methodologies that make VLSI design, particularly analog/mixed-signal (AMS) circuits, more intelligent, practical, and less heuristic-dependent. My work appears across major venues, including DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASPDAC, AAAI, ISPD, and IEEE TCAD.