 AutoESL developed most widely used HLS tool for FPGAs and was acquired by Xilinx in 2011.The HLS tool from AutoESL (renamed as Vivado HLS after Xilinx acquisition) allows FPGA designers to use C/C++ software programming languages instead of hardware description languages for FPGA design and implementation.In 2009, Cong led a group of twelve faculty members from UCLA, Rice, Ohio-State, and UC Santa Barbara and won a highly competitive NSF Expeditions in Computing Award on Customizable Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC).