Arash Ardakani

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta. My work lies at the intersection of computer hardware, electronic design automation (EDA), and artificial intelligence, with a focus on developing intelligent and efficient methods for designing and verifying digital systems.

I received my PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from McGill University and my master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. Prior to joining the University of Alberta, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley. I also have industry experience in electronic design automation and hardware verification, including working with the Design Verification team at Cadence Design Systems. These experiences have allowed me to bridge academic research with practical challenges in modern chip design and verification.

My research focuses on AI-driven electronic design automation, with an emphasis on the verification, synthesis, and optimization of digital systems. My current research interests include foundation models for hardware design, AI-assisted RTL generation and verification, intelligent physical design and placement, GPU-accelerated Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving and sampling, and structure-aware machine learning methods that operate directly on hardware representations, including logic circuits and LUT-based architectures.

More broadly, my research aims to move beyond conventional heuristic-based design flows by developing scalable learning-driven methods capable of reasoning about complex hardware designs. My long-term goal is to develop AI-assisted hardware design workflows in which learning and reasoning models can automate and jointly optimize multiple stages of the chip design process-from specification and RTL generation to verification, synthesis, and physical implementation.

I am actively recruiting motivated MSc and PhD students interested in AI-driven research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer hardware, and EDA. Prospective students and researchers are welcome to contact me at arash.ardakani@ualberta.ca.