Luca received the "Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award" from the National Science Foundation in 2006, was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2008, and received the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 2010. At Berkeley Luca was the 2002 recipient of the Demetri Angelakos Memorial Achievement Award in recognition of altruistic attitude towards fellow graduate students. In 2002, one of his papers was selected for "The Best of ICCAD," a collection of the best IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided Design papers of the past 20 years.

His research interests include design tools and methodologies for multi-core system-on-chip platforms with emphasis on system-level design and communication synthesis, design and optimization of networks-on-chip, and distributed embedded systems design. Luca coauthored over eighty refereed papers and is the holder of one patent.

Luca is an associate editor of the ACM Transactions in Embedded Computing Systems. He has served in the technical program committee of several conferences including DAC, DATE, ICCAD, and EMSOFT. He has been the tutorial chair of the Embedded Systems Week in 2008 and 2009 and the program chair of the 2010 International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT) and the 2010 International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip (NOCS).