EECS researchers John Wawrzynek and Brian Richards along with Jonathan Bachrach, Krste Asanovic, and their students and collaborators Huy Vo, Yunsup Lee, Andrew Waterman, and Rimas Aviženis, have been awarded the Design Automation Conference’s (DAC) Most Influential Paper Award for the decade 2010–2020.
Their groundbreaking paper, “Chisel: Constructing Hardware in a Scala Embedded Language” (2012), introduced Chisel, a domain-specific hardware construction language embedded in Scala. This innovation has since transformed the way digital hardware systems are designed and prototyped—bringing modern programming concepts such as parameterization, abstraction, and code reuse into circuit design.
Wawrzynek and Richards’ contributions through BWRC have played a pivotal role in pushing the boundaries of electronic design automation, with Chisel now widely used in both academia and industry and integrated into hardware design education around the world.
The DAC Most Influential Paper Award honors papers that have demonstrated significant and/or industrial impact since their publication. This prestigious recognition was introduced at the 60th DAC to celebrate influential contributions from across the conference’s history.