Professor Lim joined ECE as an assistant professor in 2001. He is currently the director of the GTCAD (Georgia Tech Computer Aided Design) Laboratory with main research focus areas on the architecture, circuit design, and physical design for three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D IC) — a three-dimensional IC built by vertically stacking different chips or wafers together into a single package. His academic research group is the largest in the world working on modeling, design, and electronic design automation (EDA) research for 3D ICs. In 2011 he fabricated the first many-core general purpose 3D processor developed in academia.

Lim received the Qualcomm Faculty Award in 2017 and 2018. He has frequently been recognized for his teaching at Tech, receiving the Class of 1940 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award in 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2020. In 2020 he was also honored with the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award for his teaching of ECE 6133: Physical Design Automation of VLSI Systems.

Lim received his B.S. (1994), M.S. (1997), and Ph.D. (2000) degrees all from the Computer Science Department at UCLA. During 2000-2001, he was a post-doctoral scholar at UCLA, and a senior engineer at Aplus Design Technologies, Inc. He is currently an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD).