The ACCAD workshop provides a forum to present and discuss the current trends in computer-aided design in support of domain-specific accelerator chips, especially for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications. The workshop will be concerned with the VLSI methodology flow from high-level synthesis to physical verification and performance prediction, particularly in the way it gets impacted with the emerging design paradigms of domain-specific instruction sets, approximate computing, in-memory computing, and stochastic computing. Of particular interest to the workshop are the transformations that VLSI CAD has to undergo to adapt to the post-CMOS technologies when they are considered in the context of accelerator design. The workshop will include, but will not be limited to, the following topics:

• High-level synthesis of machine-learning accelerators.

• Design space exploration of domain-specific accelerators.

• Tools and methodologies for in-memory computing.

• Tools and methodologies for approximate computing.

• CAD for emerging accelerator technologies: ReRAM, MRAM, Photonics, etc.

• Tools and methodologies for the post-CNN era.

• Tools and methodologies for the testing and verification of accelerator chips.

Each year, the workshop will be devoted to four focus areas of accelerator CAD. Renowned speakers are invited to speak on each of the four areas. The four focus areas selected for this year are:

1. CAD for emerging accelerator technologies.

2. Synthesis of machine-learning accelerators.

3. ML Accelerators and Reliability.

4. Hardware/software co-acceleration.

Invited speakers include:

1. Dr. Geoffrey Burr, IBM Research (confirmed)

2. Prof. Tim Cheng, HKUST (confirmed)

3. Prof. Sharon Hu, Notre Dame (confirmed)

4. Prof. Puneet Gupta, UCLA (confirmed)

5. Prof. Christian Mayr, TU Dresden (confirmed)

6. Prof. David Atienza, EPFL (confirmed)

7. Prof. Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardon, University of Utah (confirmed)

8. Prof. Yiyu Shi, University of Notre Dame (confirmed)

9. Prof. Priyanka Raina, Stanford University (confirmed)

10. Dr. Matthew Ziegler, IBM Research (confirmed)

11. Prof. Yiorgos Makris, UT Dallas (confirmed)

The workshop will be a virtual event co-located with ICCAD 2021, Nov 1 - 4, 2021.

Contact: Abe Elfadel, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE, Email: ibrahim.elfadel AT ku.ac.ae