Dr. David Kung, senior manager of the Design Automation Department at IBM Research, has been elected chair of the IEEE Design Automation Technical Committee (DATC). He will assume the two-year position July 1 and will work closely with Dr. Juan-Antonio Carballo, DATC’s current chair and partner with the IBM Venture Capital Group through the transition.

DATC, a technology member organization of CEDA, provides a forum for an exchange of ideas among researchers, developers, users, and students in design automation. It tracks the use of computer-oriented techniques in all aspects of the design process of computer and electronic systems, including design languages, logic synthesis, verification techniques, such as digital simulation, manufacturing interface data, graphics and database management.

Dr. Kung manages a department of design automation researchers and charts the future direction of design tools research for IBM. He joined the Advanced Simulation Group in IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., in 1986 to work on a massively parallel hardware simulation engine. Subsequently, Dr. Kung joined the Logic Synthesis group and was a contributor to IBM’s BooleDozer logic synthesis system. In 1999, he became the manager of the Logic Synthesis group and led project management and technical development of Placement Driven Synthesis (PDS), IBM’s physical synthesis software. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California at Berkeley, a Master of Arts degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.