Deming Chen named ACM Fellow

Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering  Deming Chen has been elevated to an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow.  He was cited “For contributions to reconfigurable computing, including synthesis algorithms and customizable AI accelerator design methodologies.” 

Photo Credit: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Chen says that he is “honored and humbled” by the designation.

“The particular field is called reconfigurable computing,” Chen says about the area for which he was cited. “Reconfigurable computing uses reconfigurable devices, and one very popular device is called a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). These devices are interesting. They are already fabricated as electronic devices, but we can physically reconfigure their logic and routing so that a specific FPGA chip implements a specific computational function. Since we have a dedicated hardware implementation for this computational function, it can lead to faster performance and better energy efficiency.”

However, there is another side of the coin, he says.

“FPGA also has a disadvantage,” Chen notes. “We must use hardware description language to program this FPGA. Typically, only hardware engineers can do it. But the number of hardware engineers is much smaller than that of software engineers. The hardware description code is complicated, hard to learn, and error prone. I contributed to improving FPGA programmability through innovative techniques, enabling people to use a higher-level description language to program FPGAs and improve overall productivity.”

Several of Chen’s research contributions stand out for their sustained impact across academia and industry on reconfigurable computing through synthesis algorithms, compilation, and AI design methodologies. For example, FCUDA was the first compiler framework to enable efficient translation of CUDA programs to FPGAs. FCUDA created a new programming environment where both graphics processing units (GPUs) and FPGAs could be programmed using the same language in a heterogeneous compute system. This vision and effort preceded similar commercial OpenCL-to-FPGA flows offered by Intel and Xilinx by five to six years. It also significantly lowered the barrier for GPU programmers to leverage reconfigurable hardware. This work helped catalyse a broader movement toward productivity-driven accelerator design.

DNNBuilder and ScaleHLS represent another impact area. DNNBuilder enabled automated mapping of deep neural networks onto FPGAs, while ScaleHLS became the first compiler to map PyTorch models directly to customized FPGA accelerators. With thousands of downloads worldwide, ScaleHLS has influenced both research workflows and industrial prototyping.

Chen also proposed a so-called A3C3 methodology (AI Algorithm and Accelerator Co-design, Co-search, and Co-generation) that has had lasting influence by framing AI and hardware as co-evolving artefacts rather than separate optimization targets. Following the A3C3 design methodology, he and his team developed the SkyNet model, which won double championships in 2019 in the DAC System Design Contest for both GPU and FPGA tracks for low-power image object detection, outperforming 100+ competitors worldwide. Later, SkyNet has been used by many other contestants and several companies.

Chen joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2005 and has been a full professor since 2015.

The ACM Fellows program was established in 1993 and recognizes the exceptional contributions of leading members of the computing field. To be selected as an ACM Fellow, a candidate's accomplishments are expected to place him or her among the top 1% of ACM members.

The induction of the ACM Fellows will be held at the ACM Awards Banquet, currently scheduled for June 13, 2026, in San Francisco, California.

Grainger Engineering Affiliations

Deming Chen is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department; he is the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and the Illinois Director of IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute. He is also the Director of the AMD Center of Excellence and the AMD HACC Initiative at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.