Hi! My name is Ziyi Yang (杨子毅). I am currently a Ph.D. student at the Microelectronics Thrust, Function Hub of the HKUST(GZ), advised by Prof. Hongce ZHANG. Prior to this, I received my B.Eng in the Department of Electronics and Information Engineering from the China University of Petroleum, Beijing, under the supervision of Prof. Zhou JIN. My research interest is formal verification.

Hardware Verification Formal Verification Electronic Design Automation

🔥 News

2026.07 One paper accepted by ICCAD 2026

2025.11 One paper accepted by DATE 2026

2025.07 Second Prize in the EDA² Xiakedao Competition

2025.07 Outstanding Bug-Fixing Team, EDA² Xiakedao Competition

2024.09 Joined HKUST(GZ) as a Ph.D. student

📝 Publications

First-Author Papers

ICCAD 2026

Forbench: Symbolic Simulation Helps Make Your Testbench More Formal

Ziyi Yang*, Wenbin Che*, Ziyue Zheng, Guangyu Hu and Hongce Zhang

International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), 2026.

* Equal contribution.

DATE 2026 Paper Code

FORWORD: Accelerating Formal Datapath Verification via Word-Level Sweeping

Ziyi Yang, Guangyu Hu, Xiaofeng Zhou, Mingkai Miao, Changyuan Yu, Wei Zhang and Hongce Zhang

Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE), 2026.

AICAS 2023 Paper

Three Challenges in ReRAM-Based Process-In-Memory for Neural Network

Ziyi Yang, Kehan Liu, Yiru Duan, Mingjia Fan, Qiyue Zhang and Zhou Jin

IEEE 5th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems (AICAS), 2023.

Collaborative Papers

ICCAD 2026

NeuroAbs: A Neuro-Symbolic RTL Abstraction Framework for Property Checking Acceleration

Zhiyuan Yan, Xiaofeng Zhou, Ziyue Zheng, Ziyi Yang, Wenbin Che, Wei Zhang, Yangdi Lyu and Hongce Zhang

International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), 2026.

IJCAI 2026 Paper

IC3-Evolve: Proof-/Witness-Gated Offline LLM-Driven Heuristic Evolution for IC3 Hardware Model Checking

Mingkai Miao, Guangyu Hu, Ziyi Yang and Hongce Zhang

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2026.

Electronics 2023 Paper

Accelerating DC Circuit Simulation through Feature Selection and LSTM-Based Time-Step Control

Zhou Jin, Ziyi Yang, Haojie Pei, Xiaru Zha, Yinuo Bai, Dan Niu, Zhenya Zhou, and Xiao Wu.

MDPI Electronics, 2023.

🎖 Honors and Awards

2025.07 Second Prize in the EDA² Xiakedao Competition

2025.07 Outstanding Bug-Fixing Team, EDA² Xiakedao Competition

2024.06 Outstanding Graduate Award

2024.05 Outstanding Individual in Undergraduate Technological Innovation Award

📖 Education

2024.06 - now

Ph.D. Student

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

2020.09 - 2024.06

B.Eng.

China University of Petroleum (Beijing)