Good news for collaborative research center 876: Peter Marwedel, vice-chair of SFB 876, received a top award for his work. He was selected as the recipient of the EDAA lifetime achievement award 2013 by the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA). The Lifetime Achievement Award is given to individuals who made outstanding contributions to the state of the art in electronic design, automation and testing of electronic systems in their life. In order to be eligible, candidates must have made innovative contributions which had an impact on the way electronic systems are being designed.

This selection of Peter Marwedel reflects his work on

• pioneering the synthesis of hardware from algorithms,
• the introduction of compilers which can be easily retargeted to new processors by using an explicit processor description,
• the generation of efficient embedded systems (where efficiency metrics include the energy consumption and real-time performance),
• education in embedded system design, and
• recent work on cyber-physical systems.

The award was openly announced and handed over at this year’s DATE conference in Grenoble on March 19th. The press release for this announcement is available on the website of EDAA.

EDAA is a professional society supporting electronic design automation in particular in Europe. EDAA is the main sponsor of the successful DATE conference.

The EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award can be considered to be the top scientific award in the area of electronic design automation. Past recipients of the award are Kurt Antreich (TU Munich, 2003), Hugo De Man (IMEC, Leuven, 2004), Jochen Jess (TU Eindhoven, 2005), Robert Brayton (UC Berkeley, 2006), Tom W. Williams (Synopsys Inc., Mountain View, California, 2007), Ernest S. Kuh (UC Berkeley, 2008), Jan M. Rabaey (UC Berkeley, 2009), Daniel D. Gajski (UC Irvine, 2010), Melvin A. Breuer (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2011) and Alberto L. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli (UC Berkeley, 2012). This means that, so far, only three scientists working at European institutions had received the award. It also means that the quality of research performed at TU Dortmund is at par with that at top universities in the world.

Our collaborative research center is very proud of this international recognition of our vice chair.