Shaolan Li has been named as a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award. Li is an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

The NSF CAREER award is the most prestigious award in “support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.” Approximately 500 awards are given annually to universities and research institutions throughout the country. The NSF especially encourages women, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities to apply.

Li’s NSF CAREER project, " Universal Design Automation Framework for Analog Integrated Systems,” aims to establish and validate a novel general-purpose analog integrated circuit (IC) design automation flow that overcomes existing productivity barriers. The research will lead to a game-changing tool that allows designers to turn their ideas into circuit structures for a wide range of analog systems in a LEGO-like plug-and-play manner, improves their design reliably with machine learning, and generates fabrication-ready mask layouts swiftly.

The project will not only bring improvement to analog IC productivity and accelerate new technology development, but will have a far-reaching impact on the competitiveness of the U.S. semiconductor industry through integrated education activities aimed to revolutionize IC technology education at both undergraduate and graduate levels, facilitating workforce revitalization.

Li joined ECE in 2019 where he leads the Georgia Tech Analog Mixed-signal Microsystems and Applications (GAMMA) group. Prior to joining Tech, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He also held intern positions in Broadcom Ltd. and NXP.

He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, IEEE Solid-State Circuit Society Predoctoral Achievement Award, HKUST Academic Achievement Medal, and the UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering Fellowship. Additionally, Li serves on the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), and the editorial board of IET Electronics Letters.