Cliff Sze is a research staff member at the IBM Austin Research Laboratory, where he focuses on integrated placement, routing, clocking and timing optimization for ASIC and microprocessor designs. Cliff has contributed to several IBM ASIC designs, as well as POWER 6, POWER 7, Xbox 360 and the Sony/Toshiba/IBM CELL processors for PlayStation consoles. He received several IBM technical/invention awards, filed more than 25 patents applications and was granted 10+ patents. His research interests include design and analysis of algorithms, computer-aided design technique for very large scale integration, physical design, and performance-driven interconnect synthesis. He received his B.Eng. and M.Phil. degrees from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his Ph.D. degree in computer engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University.

Being a senior member of IEEE, Dr. Cliff Sze has been actively serving the academic/research community, for example, on the program committees for ICCAD, ASPDAC, ISPD, SLIP, SOCC, and as a reviewer for top journals such as IEEE TCAD, IEEE TVLSI as well as IEEE TCAS. He also has served as a mentor for several SRC projects, as the program chair of International Symposium on Physical Design 2013, as the contest chair of the global routing and clock network synthesis contests in ISPD (2008-2010) and as the Computer-Aided Network Design track chair for ISCAS 2011 and 2012. Dr. Sze was the recipient of the ACM/SIGDA Technical Leadership Award and the IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference Graduate Scholarships. In order to promote EDA research and industry-academia collaboration, he has given more than 20 invited talks to the top universities and professional organizations worldwide.