ICDA aims to cultivate R&D talents for Taiwan's Integrated Circuit Design and Electronic Design Automation industry. The goals are as follows.

• Professionals equipped with IC design and EDA skills:ICDA consists of IC design and EDA sub-fields, which complement each other to achieve the most significant benefits. Students should have the essential competencies in the two sub-fields and take one as their primary research field.
• Close cooperation with industry to meet the needs of emerging applications: One feature of the Graduate School of Advanced Technology is increasing industry participation in students' thesis work to ensure that students' research topics solve future problems in five or ten years. Furthermore, the internship course is required, and the objective, contents, schedule, and expected outcomes are co-developed by the instructor and the industry partner.
• A system-level perspective: With the rapid evolution of emerging applications, system-level design becomes critical to shorten the development timeline of electronic systems. Through curriculum planning and university-industry expertise/experience sharing, ICDA will equip students with a system-level view of electronic systems to lay the foundation for future R&D leaders and high-level managers and strengthen the competitiveness of Taiwan's semiconductor industry.

Aiming at the booming emerging application fields, such as 5G/6G, automotive electronics, artificial intelligence, medical electronics, information security, the research themes of the ICDA program include (1) integrated circuit design: digital circuit design, artificial intelligence, analogy/ mixed-signal circuit design, in-memory computing, RF front-end circuits, and software-defined hardware, etc., and (2) electronic design automation: AI for EDA, EDA for AI, heterogeneous integration, and emerging technology EDA.