Wei Li PhD Candidate Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Carnegie Mellon University BSc (CUHK), M.Phil (CUHK) E-mail: werry715@gmail.com (Feb, 2026)

About

Wei Li (Neway) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Shawn Blanton and Prof. José Moura.

His research is driven by a vision of End-to-End Autonomous EDA, aiming to shift the human role from active "in-the-loop" intervention to strategic "on-the-loop" supervision. To realize this, his work integrates multi-modal LLMs to perceive design context, differentiable optimization for high-performance sub-tasks, and hardware testing to anchor AI-driven synthesis in physical silicon reality.

Wei is a recipient of Croucher Fellowship (2026), Apple PhD Fellowship in Integrated Systems (2022, 2024), and the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2024). His research has been recognized with Best Paper Awards at ASP-DAC (2021), ISSTA (2019), and ICTAI (2019), along with a Best Paper Honorable Mention at ICLAD (2025). His contributions deliver proven industrial impact, with algorithms integrated into Apple's industrial physical design flows and a joint patent filing with NVIDIA for differentiable global routing. Looking forward, Wei is committed to establishing the iDAT Lab to pioneer the next generation of intelligent design automation and testing.

Research Statement
Teaching Statement
Service Statement

Highlights

• Awarded $500,000+ in fellowships:
  • Croucher Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship for PhD from Hong Kong.
  • Apple PhD Fellowship in Integrated Systems (2022, 2024), for elite IC PhD at designated premier universities; includes funding and Apple mentorship.
  • Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2024), for top-tier PhD research; includes funding and Qualcomm mentorship.
• Industrial Impact:
  • Joint patent filing with NVIDIA (Global routing)
  • Algorithms integrated into Apple industrial physical design flows (SoC floorplanning).
  • Ongoing collaborations with Google, Intel, Broadcom, and more (Testing, Diagnosis, etc...).
  • Quarterly presentation to Apple for internal technical sharing with an audience of 100+ engineers.
• Mentees securing placements at Stanford (Ph.D.), CMU (Ph.D.), and NVIDIA.
• 4 Best Paper Awards/Mentions; the sole recipient of the Faculty Outstanding Thesis Award at CUHK.

Research Vision