UCLA Computer Scientist and Microchip Innovator Jason Cong Receives ACM Computing Breakthrough Award

Jason Cong, a distinguished professor of computer science and holder of the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received the 2024 Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.

ACM announced today the biennial award and recognized Cong for his fundamental contributions to improving the automation and customization of computing systems, especially in the design and automation of field-programmable systems.

Established in 2018, the award is named after Chuck Thacker, who was integral to the development of the first-ever modern personal computer and was a researcher at Microsoft. The honor recognizes individuals or groups who have made surprising, disruptive or leapfrog contributions to computing ideas or technologies. Cong is the fourth recipient of the award and the first from UCLA. The award is accompanied by an invitation to present at a major ACM conference and a $100,000 prize with financial support provided by Microsoft.

For more than 30 years, Cong’s research group, the VLSI Architecture, Synthesis & Technology Laboratory, has been advancing field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other reprogrammable computing systems. FPGAs are special integrated circuits that can be programmed after they have been manufactured. The ability of FPGAs to change their functionality after manufacturing has made them part of the standard hardware in many applications that require real-time processing and energy-efficient computing for varying computation patterns or workloads to meet industry demands — including data centers, telecommunications, aerospace, defense and automotive engineering.

While FPGAs are programmable, creating their configuration files is a complex and difficult task for users. Cong has spent much of his career in industry and academia building tools to address this problem. In the late ’90s, Cong worked on ways to map logic onto the look-up tables that are the building blocks of FPGAs. His work has made it possible to use software programming languages such as C or C++ to program an FPGA, significantly broadening their accessibility and usability. Cong and his students have also created commercial tools that utilize these algorithms to power the FPGA design tools in use today.

Cong’s lab has made fundamental contributions to high-level synthesis, logic mapping and physical implementation, enabling a high degree of design automation of FPGAs. His team has introduced a number of highly customized and efficient domain-specific hardware accelerators with FPGAs, including deep learning, medical-imaging processing, genomic sequencing, satisfiability solving and customized computing for big-data applications. An important benefit of these customized computing solutions is that they have shown drastically improved energy efficiency compared to conventional CPU-based computing approaches. In addition to his innovative technology advancements, Cong has also advised 48 Ph.D. graduates at UCLA Samueli, many of whom have taken up leadership roles at companies and universities.

“Jason Cong’s pioneering approach to customizable computing and architectural design tools reflects the kind of ‘leapfrog advances’ this award is intended to recognize,” said Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer of Microsoft. “His work remains essential today, underpinning highly flexible and energy-efficient FPGA architectures important to cutting-edge applications in AI, cloud computing and other rapidly evolving domains.”

At UCLA, Cong also directs the Center for Domain-Specific Computing, which investigates the optimization, compilation and customization of large-scale integrated circuits and systems for significant computing-efficiency improvement in given application domains. Established in 2009 with the support from the National Science Foundation’s Expeditions in Computing Award, the center is currently funded by the NSF, the Semiconductor Research Corporation’s Joint University Microelectronics Program, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and global industry partners.

Cong’s other accolades include the 2025 International Symposium on Physical Design’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2024 Phil Kaufman Award from the Electronic System Design Alliance and the 2016 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society Technical Achievement Award. Cong is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, IEEE and ACM. Cong has also had the most papers, five, of any researcher inducted into ACM’s FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame.